Keep Your Soul On The Mend

Hello. How's it going?

Two lines from Gregg Allman's song "The Road Is My Only True Friend" from his final album:

"Keep me in your heart
 Keep your soul on the mend"

It's the second line that fascinates me. Keep your soul on the mend. How do you do that?

It is what we all want to do, what we all need to do, but generally the soul suffocates a decades long slow death.

I dig the whole soul concept. I don't believe it is a religious thing, I don't believe it is a form of energy that escapes into the universe when you die.

I believe the soul is your essence. Not your personality, not your beliefs.

Your essence. Intangible to others, extremely tangible to you.

It is who you truly are. Stripped of your experiences, your hurts and triumphs, separate from the opinions of others.

Only you know who you truly are, although, bizarrely enough, you can lose that. You can get lost in the deadlines and commitments of life, making adjustments along the way as survival mechanisms.

Adjustments that help you survive, but initiate the process of soul suffocation.

I believe unhappiness comes from the soul's attempts to keep on the mend. You get beat up, beat down, dreams die, diseases assault, friends and relatives die, money flows out like a flood and trickles in like a leaky faucet.

Your soul keeps trying to rise up through the sludge and get some air.

Hopefully your soul never stops trying to assert itself. Of course many people give up and I don't fault them for that. You can only take so much.

It is routine for life to beat people down to the point where they see no point in feeding the soul. The walking dead waiting to die. Glazed over eyes, grim and despondent, going through the motions day after day with no point or purpose. No goals. No hope.

Personally, I believe my soul is still strong. I sense this because I still believe that Carol and I can improve our lives. Ridiculous as that may seem given our age, Carol's health issues, our financial situation.

There is still something positive? hopeful?, whatever, going on in my brain. It is the only reason I get up in the morning.

If I looked at our "now" and our future in black and white terms, as merely facts, I would be applying for a gun permit.

There is some special sauce in there, something in my soul, that holds on to the idea that we can make things better. We still have room to maneuver.

The last two years have been real eye openers for us. I semi-retired in June of 2016. Fun stuff, good stuff.

I was diagnosed with melanoma in August of 2016. Carol was diagnosed with breast cancer and a brain tumor last summer. Endured a mastectomy and the removal of a brain tumor. A couple of months ago the doc found three cancerous spots on my prostate, one tic below the level where action has to be taken.

Intensity has been ramped up, baby.

All I want is for our remaining years together to be happy and comfortable.

I am relying on my soul to get us there.