Hypertension

150/100.

No, they're not test scores nor eyesight measurements.

Lately, I've been trading blood pressure stats with some of the scholastics. There has been an outbreak of hypertension diagnoses, ever since I got a 140/100 a month ago. When my hypertensive condition was detected last month, some of the scholastics decided to have their BPs checked as well, only to discover that I wasn't the only one with fairly high stats.

Earlier this evening, as we were trading jokes outside the oratory, I suddenly felt something snap in my nape. It triggered a sharp pinching kind of pain, and I immediately thought that it might have something to do with my blood pressure. IJ and Jhaw then told me to go to the infirmary to have myself checked since by that time i was already breaking into a cold sweat. When we went to the infirmary, one of the nurses took my BP and informed me that my current stat was 150/100. Of course, I panicked. I didn't want to get sick again because it was so depressing to be confined to a room and find yourself suddenly incapable of doing the things you often take for granted.

Thanks to but unlike Wordsworth, I call these moments of utter vulnerability and helplessness my "intimations of mortality." I'm still young and being sick like this makes death less of a possibility; instead it becomes as real as my own Damocles' sword. I know death would eventually come but its own random timing scares me. 

My situation reminds me of Heidegger's insight on being-towards-death. My most individual and extreme possibility is death. No one can experience death for me. I alone will experience it. It is what individuates me and at the same time, unites me with everyone else.

Heidegger cautions against inauthentic living -- a kind of living that denies this mortal destiny. And yet, here I am, afraid of dying as if i am not going to die at all. On second thought, maybe it's not death I'm afraid of, maybe it's the pain that comes with sickness. In my case, the physical pain is only secondary. The pain of being incapacitated is even more painful, I think. To be fully conscious and yet unable to to act out one's conscious thoughts, I surmise, must be a really painful experience.

Yet maybe, these kinds of pain are birth pangs of an emergent spirituality. Recognizing my own limitedness can be a real blow to my ego. But perhaps, after the self that i had been holding on to has been shattered, when the dust of confusion settles, i would begin to see myself and my life more clearly. I am not in control. I am merely clay in the Potter's hand. 

Taken from my journal entry, dated Nov 12, 2007.