苦中一点甜

for the past one wk, i was pondering over this chinese phrase i came across in the hk drama "beyond the realm of conscience". talking abt a young prince was being bullied by the dowager since young. whenever he was bullied, there was a palace maid giving him sweetened lotus seed and reminded him "苦中一点甜".

this used to be a very encouraging phrase to me. it means a little bit of sweetness/pleasure in bitterness/misery. the 中and the 一点, shows that the little bit is really a tiny little bit, maybe a 1% out of 100. yes, this is important to me. in fact i always thought myself living under such conditions now, 苦中一点甜. i'd been trying very hard to incorporate more 甜 into my 苦. but i realised that overtime i'm losing more 甜, and the 苦 is still growing to no limit.

will it come to a stage i lost all the 甜 or the capability to enjoy even a little bit of the 甜? this sounds real scary. frankly speaking, more scary than death becos it means HOPELESS.

when buddha was practicing asceticism, he lived on a grain of rice a day. i used to think that the idea is stupid. if he could live on a grain of rice a day, he may as well dun eat. how much can the grain of rice provides him? 0.01 kcal? enough energy to chew that little grain of rice?

finally i understand what that little grain of rice meant. it means HOPE. it means that when buddha was hungry, starving, craving for something to fill the stomach, he knew that everyday at morning 8am (assume), he could put that tiny grain of rice into his mouth. he could take 1 hour to suck on the rice, another hour to chew the grain of rice into powder, then 8 hours for the grain of rice to digest and dissolve in his body, another 14 hours to recap the feeling of having a meal. psychologically, he was full and filled, he had eaten.

in robert's story, apart from his medical treatment, he tried out a lot of things. first thing he tried was reiki. after trying, a young doctor asked him, "You don't really believe in that stuff, do you?" robert replied, "You can't go twenty-four hours a day each and every day, obsessing about your cancer. Nobody can. You need a break. It cannot be in your face nonstop. I can't continually remind myself that if this doesn't go away, I'm gonna die and I'm never gonna see my kids again. So if nothing else, Reiki distracts me. And that is worth everything."

he tried many other things including acupuncture, meditation, yoga, transcendental medication, visualization, crystal therapy etc. i guess i need to do something similar. i always use running as a form of meditation (sounds incredible? if u run long distance, u know what i mean), but obviously this is not going to work out very soon. my body is withering, i can feel it.

i dun hv much time left. at most a month, highly possible i will be bedridden, 24hrs obsessing with the fact that I'm living in hell.