And the challenges too

It's important for me to detail my journey.  Not just the wonderful revelations but the challenges as well.  So, without further ado...  My challenge of the day:

My insurance company (Prudential) is declining to continue to approve my disability claim.  There's a whole lot of "story" behind it but the nut of it is that I'm currently in the appeal process and Prudential has discontinued benefits (retroactively) back to 5/1.  Yeah they just told me today 5/18/16.  The appeal process can take up to 45 days.

That means that I'm going to need to go back to work (eating is good ya know) as soon as next week.  That leaves me in a situation where I had believed that I would get to the bottom of this problem and then go back to work...  Nope.  My vision of what would happen is not what's going to wind up happening.

So my desire (to stay on disability) has impacted with "the world" and as such I'm in a state of suffering because what will happen is not what I want to have happen.

So why is that news?  Why is that any different than any other situation in life where things don't work out like you want?

It's not.

It's absolutely not any different than anything else.  The level of severity is different with all desires (desire for a loved one to be alive again, all the way to the desire to not get cut off in traffic) but they are roughly all the same.  The idea of what you want collides with reality and from that comes suffering.

Ideally accepting "what is" and letting go of your desires/cravings/wants/etc is where the solution is, but for right now I'm wallowing in the area of space between what I want and acceptance of what is reality.  It's an odd place to be.  I know intellectually what to do, but my human self is still "stuck" in the "but that's not what I wanted!" thinking/feeling.

I guess the point of this is that we are all human.  We all flail around like a drowning person when we are first thrown into waters we don't want to be in.  From the Dali Llama all the way down to "regular people".  It's really no different because we are all human.  The only real question is for how long we will let that suffering affect us.  Some people are able to process someone cutting them off in traffic in moments, others take an afternoon.

For tonight I'm flailing at the injustice of the insurance companies, trying to figure out what's next, and how I'm going to grab my "vision" of what I want my life to be, with what reality has in store for me.

Reposted from May 18, 2016