I’ve decided I’m officially fed up with this Lyme bullshit.

What an utter and complete drag.

Now that that’s out of the way, let me get to everything else. As I sit here and think about it I’m realizing that there’s actually so much that I think I’m going to have to break it up over several posts. Let me start with getting some emo stuff off my chest. I’ll follow it up later with treatment specifics and their results as well as my horrible new diet.

So, as I get closer and closer to the one-year point of my illness (September 24th) I find myself often spiraling lower and lower emotionally even while I slowly (ever so very slowly) seem to be getting better. The Groundhog Day effect of waking up to this life gets evermore challenging. Recently, the better days have been coming more frequently, but the bad ones (like today) seem to hit harder.

But like the song goes, “always look on the bright side of life”, right? To do this, I keep mental (and sometimes physical) lists of things that make me feel good and positive about life. This practice isn’t some self-help or Power of Positive Thinking technique that I saw on Dr. Phil (I’ve never actually seen the Dr. Phil show). It’s just something that I’ve sort of done all my life to get through rough patches… of which this is the roughest.

For example, here’s a recent inspiration:

While doing a long run up in Cape Cod last Saturday I watched as a leaf falls from a tree branch overhanging the road ahead of me. Without breaking stride and without any wild grasping I catch the leaf in my hand as I run. A smooth, effortless, graceful action.

Now I know that this in it self isn’t all that remarkable, however, I enjoy looking at these things through a broader lens — a lens of interconnections and associations; couplings between seemingly unrelated things and events. A sort of Zen-ness of everything being everything. Through this lens I see that, perhaps, all of the events in my life have come together to put me in this exact spot at this exact time to catch this leaf. I imagine that Lyme disease has screwed up my life in such a way, affecting the time and space of my existence, to put this leaf in my hand.

But so what, right? What actual value does catching a leaf really have? None, but that’s what I enjoy about it. There is no inherent value in catching the leaf and it changes nothing in the fabric of existence, but the fact that I was there to catch it means volumes to me. It represents some magical connection between… well, everything… and it’s within this thought that I find a little beauty.

These moments are why running and athletics are so incredibly important to me. I experience little bits of beauty every day when I’m out and about, but it’s during running or biking that I feel them most. Because of this, I feel that staying physically active is truly the greatest weapons in my arsenal of treatments against Lyme. While so many people are stuffing headphones in their ears to listen to their special Nike+ workout playlist or tune in the TV at the gym to kill the “boredom”, I use running/biking to unplug from life and plug in to living. Had I not been tuning in I may have miss my leaf entirely. The beauty of the experience drowned out by some techno beat.