Random Healthy Thoughts about Living
It’s never as satisfying as we think it will be to get what we want.
For one, we often underestimate what we are capable of achieving in the first place. Then we end up settling in over-indulgence because there is so much discomfort associated with reaching our goals… and in deciding what to do after we achieve them. There’s a deep-seated fear in all of us that we may die alone or unhappy based on decisions we made in life. These fears keep us from living up to our full potential and force us to miss out on the wonderful surprises life can offer when we flow with it.
One of the first thoughts I usually have after I injure (or almost injure) myself is “Shit, I don’t have insurance anymore. That could’ve been really bad”. It turns out, that is one of the (only) reasons I stayed in my corporate job: to have benefits. Somehow, I was under the impression that having medical insurance could give me peace of mind, because I would be taken care of if something happened to me, when really I was just much more complacent. This leads me to see there is clearly less concern for quality life and more concern for not allowing it to end.
I know this will sound like I’ve gone really far off the deep end but those injuries are what make us feel alive. Well, at least the risk of injuries. This is coming from the perspective of someone who has watched two elderly people pray that they would just die already. They’ve got foot doctors and heart doctors and doctors for their pain and even nurses that make house visits to take their blood. All are from separate entities and hardly communicative with one another, if at all. Even though my grandparents want to just get it over with already, they live in constant fear of what will happen if they do not follow the doctors’ orders. Their bodies have become machines that they do not know how to operate without a manual and the font is too impossibly small for them to read so they rely on mechanics.
To quote someone I don’t remember, doctors have become engineers of the body, and each one of them gets a different part. I’m not trying to simplify the training that doctor’s go through in the best years of their lives. They commit a large portion of their time to learning all about the body. I can’t be sure they do that with lifestyle counseling for patient care, considering most of the people that visit them, visit for a reason. A reason that is not “tell me how to live my life” but rather “please fix me, I don’t know how”. After so many years of diagnosing problems, it isn’t any wonder why doctors begin to exclusively look for them. There’s naturally a bias toward what we know has been true in the past.
My grandma tells me, “you used to could call the doctor and they’d come to your house”. In that visit, the doctor could see the living conditions of the individual, first hand, and they’d often incorporate such knowledge into the regimen for treatment. While the motives were pure, having the patients go to an office eliminated important data from the tool kit of the physicians. After we sterilized our medical system, we began selecting for adaptability in those that could not be so sure how to take care of themselves. Nobody expects everyone to be able to diagnose themselves, but knowing the basics should be more ubiquitous.
Doctors in the past were given much more information to work with because the human connection was still there. This meant they were much more practiced in the art of improvisation and not so stuck in a pattern. Moreover, similar to the way we disconnected from our bodies (most evidenced by our overindulgence in addictions like drugs, sex, sugar, and alcohol) the pharmaceutical industry has numbed the countless medical providers with paid-for lunches and free pills from a drug rep that is more concerned with ROIs and KPIs than the source of any human pain. Those are the advisors of our advisors.
In the same way the doctors are not working together in a holistic way (or even suggesting holistic lifestyle changes) we’ve become disconnected from our own innate wisdom of how to treat the body properly. This information used to be passed down from generation to generation and confirmed by a doctor that likely lived in the community. That doctor would be subject to intense scrutiny if he allowed someone in his community to succumb to something preventable. One more point of countless issues I see as a former medical coder is: the number of medical diagnoses there are is pathological (no pun intended but that was too good to pass up). The reason being, we’ve observed that many separate medical conditions. The reason being, we were looking for them so incessantly, never even considering they may all be the result of much fewer but more serious chronic conditions.
I wondered how many of those conditions were preventable if the patient were aware of whole food diets and supplements. Then I remember my customers at the health food store I worked at so many years ago. I remember some of them operated like clockwork, showing up every thirty days to get a refill. I remember some were on the verge of committing to a new lifestyle but had difficulties with falling back into old habits. Once someone tried to use their Health Savings Account card and was denied. She had no problem using it on pharmaceuticals.
Then I wondered what the vast majority of the city that did not shop there did to ensure their own health. For many, the supplements were entirely too expensive so they never even stepped foot in the door. Those were probably the people that could’ve benefitted most from the information I had, but don’t think for one second that rich people were healthy. Some of those folks are the gluttonous diabetics that kept us in business by buying the most expensive blood sugar stabilizers in the store. Which leads me to the Dr. Oz super fans that would immediately ask for the magic diet pill he’d mentioned on the show that week, every week. They wanted to put in the least amount of effort to solve the problem of life.
I’ve kinda started to cluster around the idea: we have co-creative power with life, so someone that has deeper insights than others and greater intuitive capabilities can stay perpetually in a euphoric state. When we know behind the scenes information we fall for the illusion of having some sort of control in a situation. When life reveals a secret to us in some way we were not aware of, we can experience a similar level of heightened emotion. It occurred to me today that being sneaky is part of the thrill of doing a taboo thing sometimes and I’m almost certain that has to be adaptive. Maybe we get caught in the act of doing something, or maybe we receive unexpected news, something changes in us somatically. We feel __________. We feel.
With every plot twist in our lives, we have the opportunity to build a new storyline. The more uncertainty we introduce, the more alive we feel because we have to actively participate again. That’s where the magic is. Even witches have this thing about not having an audience. You can only perform magic where everyone present actively participates. The magic is the joy you bring to one another for believing in the same story together. Sharing space and time with nothing more important than the moment. If we get our story straight, we can all enjoy this life.
Originally written in Collective Journaling at The Stoa
