Youth is mostly filled with arrogance, narcissism and blindness to the fact that we’re actually alive.

We assume that we’re the centre of the universe and are fully and subjectively consumed by our emotions and thoughts we are our anger, fear and hubris.

The tempering of this is often when we have children and have to put someone else’s needs in front of our own. The centre of our universe shifts.

Then comes illness, where in the beginning we are always going to recover, young people post memes like ‘it will get better’, ‘tomorrow will be a better day’ and so on….

Until the day comes when you realise that is not always true. You will if you’re (un)lucky get old, sick and die. Some illnesses leave you with a hole inside, things will never get better, life changes from the robust health of youth to having to measure every step, to have to manage constant life threatening conditions.

To be sick of trying to explain to people asking “when will you be better”. To be scared that every time you’re waiting to go down for surgery that you won’t be coming out, that every appointment with the consultant is going to be more bad news. That every time you plan to go ‘out out’ or travel that you’ll have to let everyone down again because you’re having a bad time.

How do you cope? Acceptance is the hardest step. It will take as long as it takes, the big step is the shift from subjective to objective, to become mindful, to literally watch your mind.

To examine every emotion and thought. To not try and block them, to let them in, examine them, and let them go. To accept that what you were is gone, you’re not that person anymore and won’t be again, you need to get the best out of the ‘new’ you.

You are not your body, it’s only the meat vehicle that you’re driving, your emotions are your body’s survival instincts and your thoughts arise from those emotions.

The true you lies in your stillness, your silence and what you were before you were born and will be when your meat vehicle expires.

Nothing in this theatre of existence can touch that. You can cloud it, not realise that’s who you really are and your survival instinct emotions and thoughts will try to distract you from it. But when you observe and examine those thoughts and emotions, that’s where you’re looking from.

Then you realise that you are the universe, just like a wave is the sea. Like the wave you arise from the sea of existence and go back to that to which you are always joined even while you are that wave.

This is how we cope.