There is a relentlessness to this disease that deals a crushing blow to the spirit. Just as we feel there is a sense of progress, there is a circling back. Just as we get a strategy that seems effective in place, you forget it and need to rediscover it and relearn it. To be traveling in a circular path not a spiralling one, feels like being in a rut. It has a heaviness that tends to discourage and weigh us down.

Strange, we are used to spirals and circling around to learn and know on a deeper level, but repetition and re-learning the same thing is a dreary task. Indeed, it is a real drag. Yet, that is the need. Integrity finds us having to accept the truth of this drudgery. Memory may or may not ever be capable of retaining the strategies for coping that we develop and put in place. If it can't, we are left with no choice but to rely on repetition and re-learning. As tedious as it is, it is still deserving of our best efforts, deepest respect, and warmest care. Perhaps I write this more for me than for you. I am not easily accepting of this need, yet I am being asked to look beyond the repetition and look at you, the one actually enduring it. Your cmmitment, your determination, your perseverance leave no room for my discouragement. We have a difficult situation and it demands a respectful attentiveness.

So, as you struggle to deal with early mornings of wakefulness and daily experiences of relentless obstacles to ease and rhythm and relief in performing life's everyday tasks, we must repeat, re-learn, re-state what we have to know, do, and discover...one more time.

Perhaps it's really only a magnified version of what life exacts of all of us, repetitious, mundane tasks. Perhaps it causes us to really realize the meaning of life is hidden in them. We are not always engaged in exciting, peak experiences. In fact, most of our life is spent in the mundane. Best we figure out how to be psychologically at one with it and with ourselves. After all, it is the necessity of life. The fabric is ours to weave around it, not without it. I guess that calls for Amen.