And Popeye said I Yam what I Yam!

The second article of Donna McCullough to run in The Alzheimer’s Reading Room entitled: A Spiritual Perspective on Alzheimer’s Disease and Caregiving (Part 2) deals with the Popeye aphorism “I Yam what I Yam” It of course doesn’t say that, doesn’t even come close. That is what I read into it. You can read it and make up your own take on what is said in the article by either clicking on the title or on Archive to go either to the Reading Room or to my Archive where it is posted.

Donna states at the end of her essay:

The reason that I am discussing 'who you really are' is to help you to recognize that you are more than you think.

You are not your feelings, nor are you a diagnosis or an experience that you are having. If you can begin to see yourself as the one who watches or notices your experiences than it will be far easier to let go of limiting feelings and thoughts and perceptions.

As you begin to identify yourself as the part of you that observes your experience instead of identifying yourself as your experience (e.g., “I am depressed” becomes “I am the awareness that a part of me experiences depression.”) you will begin to experience a sense of freedom from the problems in your life.

So the first step is to move the focus of your awareness from 'I am a tired, frustrated caregiver' to 'I am the part of me that observes that I feel like a tired, frustrated caregiver. I am the observer.' 

Popeye is more fatalistic in his description of the why of him. “That’s it, take it or leave it, I am that way and can’t do much about it” he seems to say.

Donna is more comprehensive in saying much the same thing. You are the way you are for many reasons, all coming from living experience, emotions specifically emphasized by her, in the course of your life. It is all the experience happening to the you who you are that forms you into what and who you become at a given moment in time. So long as you remain the observer seeing the events of your life in action and unfolding, you can see what is there.

If you choose to be what is happening that is the best way to lose sight of who you are. This happens, happens only too often in the course of our lifetime.

This is so because we get so consciously involved in what we are about in a given moment or at a given time, having only the time to do all that is called for to get done whatever it is we are doing, we have no ability to focalize beyond that to see what more exists of us and of the circumstance of what we are.

I recognize this is hard to fathom. To explain it more concretely think of it in this way. In this capsule of space in which we seem to be passing through time, we all of a sudden happen, having been born. From there we proceed in time to the point where we die and are no longer in the capsule passing through time. From Birth to Death, that is all of life as we know it. Nothing else concrete can be ascertained

We can make observations and draw conclusions from whatever is happening in us and about us while we are passing through.

When we are born we are bio-chemical masses, confined within a covering, able to move. We are otherwise pretty mindless and equally helpless. The physical properties of the bag, water with bio-chemical components, formulate an integrity that opens this unique organism, us, to learning survival in the environment of time and space where we find ourselves.

In the process of spending time and learning from everything about us a conscious thinking person emerges. This person in the company of others then seems to follow a process that I simplify in this way:

We live from birth to death during which time we seem to follow this pattern.

In the early part as we are learning we wonder what we will become.

In the middle part we work feverishly on what we have become, striving to keep up with all it calls on us to do, having no time but to fulfill the obligations of what we are.

In the final part we no longer are driven to do all we did in the middle part, nor do we concern ourselves any more with what more we might become. It is at this time we have the freedom to look at all of it and try to make sense out of it.

It is at this time, if we are able, to do what Donna recommends,  

… begin to identify yourself as the part of you that observes your experience instead of identifying yourself as your experience… you will begin to experience a sense of freedom from the problems in your life.

You will be able to recognize that all of this time you were not what ever it was happening, but you were the silent who, behind it all, growing in the experiences you were having. You further realize that there seems to have been both pattern and purpose in this, becoming who you finally are.

Then another realization hits you between the eyes! Some silent force was directing you in all of this.

It is in this recognition of silent force in control rather than us that is the most mind boggling.

My diagnosis of AD, my acceptance of it, making a commitment to do some good with it, made me realize the final purposefulness of it. What is more it fits quite nicely as the culmination to the pattern I was following.

My spiritual perception has been found in the sum of all my experiences emotions included.