Save Yourselves

“Yeah. I played war in the morning with my cereal when I was a kid.” I revealed during a break in a small massage therapy class recently. “My brother joined in. But he was a real romantic. I guess I’ve always been a hawk of sorts.” The students median age about 59 paused. There was no sound in the room—for a brief moment.

The instructor a young early to mid-70-year-old said nothing. I couldn’t remember what struck me to announce such a thing. Could it have been the age-old religious conflicts that have never stopped for a millennium? We only lie to ourselves to think they have. The ones that kill thousands in a day or a week? Is it that I knew that war plagued humanity since its inception? Probably.

We’ve been warned verbally, in all sorts of philosophical and religious books that this was and will be the nature of humanity. It’s about greed, really. We’ve been warned by those earthy figures whom we stole from and laid waste their cultures.

It has been told in every breeze known to us humans. It’s in nature, yet true nature knows not to waste. Anything in the wild is somehow gifted back to nature. There is little sadness. There is a more acceptable loss in nature. Unlike what humanity accepts. Humanity never learns about wasting. Humanity grows more incredulous with their greed, their inequities. Humanity turns away from their own truths.

Their own truths is about immortality. The immortality that humans seek ingesting drugs, instead of changing their daily habits before its too late. A person who smokes nicotine for ten years will have destroyed all they needed to not take merely any drugs within the first 72 years of their lives.

A person who does mostly linear natural exercises in movement daily in the outdoors will most likely not need drugs to sustain their natural lives, ever. Natural lives by the way implies, not existing on pain-relievers when they could’ve chosen rest, proper hydration, and proper diet.

Yes, we have all been trained in some way on how to balance our meals by the time we are in the fifth grade in the United States. I’m not speaking of cutting-edge dietary knowledge. I’m speaking of basic knowledge of what good and bad foods are. Most of us, not all perhaps do know what a good food is if we had attended a public elementary school system. Which most of Americans have.

However, our parents are supposed to be the ones addressing dietary concerns, and too our physicians as well. So then, there is no excuse in this country.  

Our own arrogance allows us to believe we are to be immortal. Anyone in their right mind knows that’s a lie.  Most people can avoid taking daily drugs in their 40’s, and 50’s if they had been consistent with daily exercise, proper hydration, balanced diet, and work ethic. But we reward ourselves with falsely believing we are owed. Somehow, we believe that falsehood.

We seem to forget our live expectancy is not forever. Neither is it definitive. It’s actually a sliding scale.  There is no stopping a sliding scale. Perhaps there’s a delaying of it. Yet that leads to our own inevitability. Our destination of rest.---Jody-Lynn Reicher