When our group of MS & Me bloggers all met in the same room for the first time last December, we talked about a lot of things… A lot! Many of those things thankfully, had nothing to do with multiple sclerosis at all. You see we’re normal, healthy people who have lives, loves, interests and passions just like everyone else. Healthy people with MS.
This idea of passions really struck, so we decided to open a monthly series of blogs dealing with the subject. Not just passions in everyday life – as these are very passionate people – but how our passions have been affected by MS and how our life with multiple sclerosis is changed by those passions.
I’m a head-before-heart guy, myself. I dived right into the information side of the disease before I could get a handle on the living with MS part. It doesn’t work for everyone (and many – former wife included – might say that it didn’t work all that well for me) but whether first, last or during I believe fully that information, thus knowledge of MS is power.
I dug and dug – online, in medical libraries, at doctors’ offices, friends-of-friends – for information about MS. Information is one thing but what I really sought without knowing it was knowledge.
The difference between information and knowledge is, to the chef in me, like the difference between a trolley full of groceries and a fully cooked meal. One is ingredients, the other is put through its paces in order to be of some proper use. But use to whom?
That’s where the term “Knowledge is Power” takes a bit of a change for me. Knowledge is, indeed, power but power only for one. The information that I gained and turned into useful knowledge for myself only served me and those nearest to me. That is one of the reasons I began writing the Life with MS blog over 10 years ago. To share the knowledge I’d gained.
Then I came to truly understand; information is fuel, knowledge is power, but only when the power is shared does it become ‘energy’.
MS Ireland saw this three years ago as the final touches were put on the launch of MS & Me. My fellow bloggers understood it as they lined out to bare their souls to you on a weekly basis, so that our broader community might benefit from the technical information they’d turned into personal knowledge.
The Japanese word for teacher is ‘Sensei’ which literally translates to “person born before another”, but generally is accepted as ‘one who has gone before’. We all learn from those who have gone down the many labyrinth paths of multiple sclerosis. We gain our own knowledge along the way. If we choose to share that knowledge – that Power – with others on the journey the power becomes energy to be passed on to the next and to the next.
Knowledge, milled from the information I’ve mined over the years has helped me to live my best possible life with multiple sclerosis. My passion is passing that knowledge along so that its energy might empower others the way my fellow bloggers empower me.
Wishing you and your family the best of health.
Cheers
Trevis
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