Personal Perspective: Brain injury turning life into a daily endurance marathon can wear us out. One way to persevere is to notice moments of joy.
Difficulties assail people with brain injury in their everyday lives. Whether it’s struggling to rise out of bed after another non-restorative night of sleep; remembering to eat breakfast; expending cognitive effort in daily; or being patient with the need to pace and rest regularly, these activities, which many adults take for granted, comprise layers of continuing difficulties that only gradually over the years attain automaticity, one layer at a time.to finish the job properly.
Brain injury turning life into a daily endurance marathon can crush us, wear us out, or demand that we find a way to persevere. One of those ways is to notice moments of joy and signs of being seen. I wrote about some of these moments in my memoir“I sat down at my kitchen table, mind blank, and two cardinals flew by my window. I stood up and walked over to watch them.”
Moments of joy arrive unexpectedly. You see them when you’re open to noticing. When these cardinals flew by my visual field,whose side effects included fatigue didn’t bother me. Yet I hadn’t lost my ability to notice things like that flash of bright red on a bleak winter day. The cardinals “hopped up to a higher branch, bopped back down to a lower one. They flitted further away, then hopped closer to face me fully. I waited for them to fly off as cardinals were wont to do. They didn’t. A thought crept into my head:. Malaise kept me rooted, but the cardinals didn’t leave. I frowned. So unusual of these red birds with their black masks.
That hour with the cardinals reminded me of the early years after my brain injury. I’d walk home alone, exhausted from rehab and medical appointments, and I’d look up at the blue sky. It was the only good thing in my life at that moment.
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