The Fish on the Camel

Wrestling with a traumatic brain injury for now over 30 years, I have experienced a litany of neurological symptoms.  The last 4 years have been particularly difficult as I have been forced to take disability from a very successful and beloved profession due to frequent incapacitating migraines (currently 80% of my life).  By far, the greatest medicine, strength, comfort, and optimism come when I focus on others and their needs.  When I lose myself in the lives of others, I truly find myself and vice versa.  

It is a fundamental Christian doctrine and I am a devout Latter-day Saint (Mormon).  Obviously, I daily fall short in this regard, but I regularly have the opportunity to serve and care more about others and their trials as I am a husband to a very strong wife and father of 7 remarkable kids, all at different stages in life. Also, as part of my Faith, I have been blessed to be assigned as a "home teacher" to an elderly widow.  This is a primary way the Lord takes care of His children, via others.  Whenever I am able to visit her and provide even the little service that my health allows, I am reinvigorated.  It is nothing short of miraculous.  Like the "camel and the fish" analogy, this principle is much more easier said than done.  Yet, it is a true principle and I hope and pray that I will have a greater desire and disposition to put it in much greater practice.  My head pain remains, but my capacity to endure it increases immeasurably, not to mention forcing my selfishness away from my own tribulations.

I too, needed this reminder for my own practice, which had been daily and recently waned once again. I have been a fish on a camel several times in life and fortunately have been able to make the leap off when needed. Probably the biggest time was when I quit my full-time job, sold my home & most possessions to create/facilitate a volunteer literacy project in Belize Central America and become a fulltime Storyteller in 2005. That leap led to so many other possibilities than I ever imagined. It also immersed me in a world where time was viewed so differently than what I was used to in the mid-Atlantic US. In Belize, the pace was calm, people mattered Most not possessions. I stopped wearing a watch. I learned to let go and BE because that's what nearly everyone around me was doing and they seemed far more at peace than people back in the US. Perhaps they had fewer things in Belize, but wow, they had a lot more Deep relationships with each other. And in the end, that's what matters. That and finding a sort of inner peace that then sustained me as I carried their beliefs along with me through life. Thank you for the reminder, I feel I am at another leaping point. To where, I am not sure. :) HUGS from my heart to yours!
Kristin

 I think the author's observation that a new direction starts like the fish on the camel is right on.  We have times that we are successful, externals are in place, others think we are doing great, and on the inside we aren't happy, aren't fulfilled, are thirsty.  Those are significant times in life that could result in giving up what I have to seek what I'm missing, even though others and even myself think I've got it made.  Such times are potentially calling me to the hero's journey, calling me to follow my bliss, to use Campbell's language.  I'm reminded of Nietzche's statement that "those who were dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."  A major fish-on-the-camel experience for me occurred a long time ago.  I spent the first two and a half years of college in a Catholic seminary in Pittsburg, wanting to be a priest.  I was doing well, was getting praise, and could have gone far on that life path.  But, I became thirsty.  The calling that I had inside of me wasn't fitting in that setting.  I felt hindered in my growth, and after weeks or months of internal anguish I made the difficult decision to leave, not knowing where I was going in life.  I wandered the streets of Pittsburg for a couple days in a state of confusion or psychosis, and then came out of it feeling clear that I had made the right choice for me  I felt free and alive.  And I moved on.  A major thirst was quenched.   

I once met a fish on a camel.  He looked at me as if I were a fish swimming a stream/river/lake . . . Perhaps, bigger still, a deep blue ocean.  No thirst.  Inhabiting a water I was born to, a well satisfied fish!  
He looked at me one day as if I were different than he.  Without "words" he gave me the impression he was thirsty, and was suffering as a result of it.  I've watched and prayed for this fish (who, by the way, did/does appear to have times of refreshment "in the water") over the course of nine years now.  In this observance, I have found this fish to be quite valuable.  (Blessed is he who hungers and thirsts . . . he shall "see" God).  His thirst is a gift.  
How might I know this?  
I, too, thirst.
i look forward to the day I can go home . . . to Heaven's water.

in the mean time, we fish have to swim beside each other!  No one fish greater or lesser than another in our Maker's 
Eye.  Let us love one another for loving is of God. (John)