Home » Posts tagged 'prevention' (Page 2)

Tag Archives: prevention

Pray too late

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I can’t make myself pray for people who have put themselves in a hole. They say “I need a miracle to help me get out of here”, and I say “What is the point?” You didn’t fall in. You climbed in, knowingly, for a decade.

It isn’t an accident that they have lung cancer or clogged arteries. Smoking cigarettes and eating poorly and refusing to exercise are choices. They chose to get sick, one bad decision at a time, over and over. So why pray for healing?

I know a guy who was slated to have heart surgery to clear up a blockage. They had to stop the procedure when they realized that the 30% blockage was really a 90% blockage. They’ll try again later. I’ve gotten emails and private messages asking me (and hundreds of others) to pray for him. The problem is, he weighs over 300 pounds. He put himself in this situation. Why pray? Why ask for divine intervention?

When my Mom got lung cancer after smoking two packs of cigarettes a day for 20 years, she was surprised. No amount of praying was going to undo that damage. No miracle was going to happen. When we came back from the doctor’s after finding out the diagnosis, she asked me if she could smoke. She’d thrown out her cigarettes when we were going to the doctors. She had an idea what was going to happen. The cigarettes were still in the house – but in the trash can. I told her that I would refuse to help her get better if she continued to smoke. Why waste my time?

There were plenty of people who would stand outside the cancer doctor’s office and smoke a cigarette before getting their treatment. What a waste. What stupidity.

I remember reading about how money is tight in England, and with the state-funded medical insurance program, they have to be very mindful about their resources. An overweight, elderly smoker who needs a heart transplant is likely to get passed over in favor of the younger person who doesn’t smoke. They take the time and money and spend it on someone who is likely to get some use out it. Why waste resources on someone who is going to waste it? I remember Americans being all up in arms about this. “Dignity of human life” and “How dare they” and “That isn’t fair” and all that, they said. Nonsense. Why put forth the effort when the person isn’t putting forth the effort?

Why pray for the person to be healed when they aren’t doing anything for themselves? Too late. The horse has already left the barn.

I really don’t feel I have the right words for this. I’ve thought about this for years, and I still don’t know exactly how to say it. I’m so frustrated with people waiting to the last minute and doing all the wrong things for their health and then being surprised that they have a chronic disease. Are we so blind as a nation, as human beings, that we think we can get by without paying the consequences? Are we so stupid that we think we should reap when we didn’t sow? Why do we think we are entitled to health when we refuse to create it? Good health isn’t an accident. Will power isn’t for the few. So many people are unwilling to work for their health, and then expect everybody else to feel sorry for them.

Maybe that is the problem. Passive lives all around. We don’t think about how we have to do things for ourselves. We blame others for our own failures. We blame our parents, our genes, our teachers for our own failures. We don’t have someone putting good food in front of us as adults – we have to provide it. Like children, we delight in treating ourselves with snacks and desserts. We pleasure ourselves every day with things that are bad for us, refusing to even try real food. We get a perverse pleasure out of not exercising, saying “you can’t tell me what to do.” We are children, not adults. We are killing ourselves with our childish behavior too.

No prayers. No miracles. We can’t wait for a savior. We have to save ourselves.

Heart Exorcise

Posted on by | Leave a comment

While waiting for my cardiologist, I heard his comments with the patient in the room next to mine. The walls are very thin and so I was able to hear almost all of the conversation. Things weren’t going well for the patient. I could tell it was also very awkward for the doctor. He is fairly young, this doctor, in a field where he sees very sick people all day long.

I had seen the patient before in the waiting room. I suspected he had cancer by the color of his skin. It also looked like he had gone bald from chemotherapy. He was also being pushed around in a wheelchair and had oxygen. So there was far more than just heart problems going on here.

The doctor started off by saying “Sorry to hear about the diagnosis and stuff.” And then he asked the patient if he wanted to continue treatment he was on, assessing what was valuable and what wasn’t. With a stage four cancer diagnosis, you have to reassess everything. Some treatments are just more hassle than they are worth. Some are worthless. They had to make some hard decisions. Cure wasn’t an option. Just easing symptoms. Palliative care.

I thought how hard it has to be to be a doctor and go from patient to patient, from hard thing to hard thing. Of course he’s a cardiologist and people get sick and die. They’re not here because they’re well. I am one of the few patients who is well and is doing well. In part I go to a cardiologist because I want to stay well. But I am unusual. I believe in prevention, rather than cure.

The doctor came to visit me next. He was in a rush and wanted to get right into the exam. I asked the doctor when we had a pause how he goes from one patient to another when it’s a hard thing. He looked at me briefly and he said “You just get used to it.” That really wasn’t what I was expecting. I was hoping he would say something useful like “I pray” or “I do yoga”. But he just said “You get used to it.”

I could see later that he was shaking. You don’t get used to it. You don’t get used to carrying heavy burdens. And when you know that someone you know, even if it’s just a patient and not someone you love, is going to die soon and in a ugly way then it’s a heavy thing to have to carry.

The only way of getting rid of these feelings that are hard is processing them. It’s not about ignoring them or about running away from them. That it is not dealing with them.

Hard feelings are just like having to go to the bathroom. We have to know what to do when we have that feeling in our body. Stress is the accumulation of a lot of hard feelings that have not been processed. Stress is like poop. If you don’t get rid of poop it will build up and you will become very sick. If you don’t get rid of the anger and the sadness and the fear it will back up and you will also become very sick. There are ways to process it at the time, but the best thing is to learn how to not store it at all.

I do that by my practice. Part of that is exercising and by eating well daily. I get enough sleep. I make sure that I am strong enough to be able to handle these feelings when they come to me. Praying and reading the Word daily helps too. When something does surprise or overwhelm me, I remember to return to my routine and my practice. I remember to pray. I remember to do yoga. I remember to do art. I remember to write.

When something extra difficult happens, not the everyday sort of stress, I make sure to set aside a little extra time to do all of those things. I may paint a painting specifically for that purpose. I may write a poem just on that issue. I’ll write more, even though I may not publish it. I have to process it or it will process me.

Think of a food processor – something is going to get ground up into little bits. I’d rather have some say as to what gets ground up. You don’t just “get used to it”. If you don’t process something hard, it will use you up and wear you out. It will wash you away until you are nothing.

Mental health day

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I’ve finally realized that my job doesn’t pay me in real money. It pays me in days off. That is part of government jobs.

And while I resent having to work another 14 years before I can retire, I’ve realized that I can kind of “retire” right now. If I waited until I was able to retire, I might be too infirm to do what I want to do. If I follow the path of my parents, I’ll not even make it to retirement time.

So I’ve started taking what in calling “mental health days”. Once a month I take off the Monday after I’ve had the weekend off. This means I have four days off in a row. I don’t do anything I have to do – I do stuff I want to do. I read, or write or work on art. I do the stuff I would do if I was retired.

I’m practicing being retired. But I’m also doing preventive maintenance on my soul.

(more) Thoughts on mental health.

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Let us not confuse mentally ill with homicidal.

I think we can agree that all people who are homicidal are mentally ill. The fact that some people feel it is necessary to express their frustrations with life by killing others is most certainly proof that they are not well adjusted. Being well adjusted is a hallmark of mental health. How much do you fit in? How well can you take care of yourself? If you can get along with others, you are well adjusted.

I’ve never understood the idea of trying to determine if a murderer is sane or not. If you kill anyone for any reason other than self-defense, you aren’t sane, it would seem to me.

Now, let’s shift gears for a moment. This is important. All people who are mentally ill are not homicidal. To have a mental health diagnosis does not mean that you are a murderer. It does not mean that you have to live in a group home. It does not mean that you are a danger to anybody.

It is the same as having a diagnosis of diabetes or of high cholesterol. It is something you live with and deal with.

The media must stop bandying about the phrase “mentally ill” every time someone does something horrific enough to warrant being on the news. They might be mentally ill. One in four people are. But the media is the media – not trained mental health professionals. They are not qualified to make an assessment on the mental state of anyone.

How much of the bad press that mentally ill people are getting is why there are so many mentally ill people who are not well adjusted? Who would want to go get help with their mental health problems if they are going to immediately tagged as being homicidal? There is a huge stigma to being mentally ill, already. It is often seen as a lack of willpower or a character flaw. Add the mistaken idea of homicidal in the mix and no wonder people won’t take care of this problem.

Mental health is treatable. You can live a long and productive and happy life and have a mental illness. Exercise helps. Eating well helps. Actually, I can’t think of anything that isn’t helped by exercise and eating well, but mental health is high on the list. If you want to start feeling bad, lay around all day eating junk food. Multiply that by a month and you’ll really be in a funk. Start taking care of yourself and you’ll see a difference not only in your body but in your mood.

How much of our mental health issues in this country are from people not being taught that it is OK for them to speak up for themselves? And if one in four people really are mentally ill, as the saying goes, then it really isn’t that unusual at all. Perhaps “mentally ill” is the new normal.

Fear and ignorance could have killed me.

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I can’t let other people’s fear keep me from taking care of my health.

I didn’t get a mammogram for years because everybody told me how painful it was. Friends and comedians would joke that getting a mammogram was like slamming your breast in the freezer door, or putting it in a vise. Who would want to do that?

I didn’t go to a gynecologist because my mother never impressed on me that I should. She never went as far as I knew, once she had stopped having children. She thought that sex was dirty. Sex was something you did once a week as a duty to your husband. So she certainly didn’t teach me how to keep my female parts healthy.

Also, friends talked about how uncomfortable it was to go to the gynecologist. Awkward, unpleasant, strange – they really weren’t selling it as something I should do. They always talked about going for a checkup as a chore, kind of like how my Mom talked about sex. One even said she’d rather have a root canal than go to the gynecologist. Either she has a great dentist or a terrible gynecologist.

Then three years ago I read “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and I realized that a woman in her 30s could die of cervical cancer. For some reason I thought that was an older woman’s disease. So I went for my first checkup in 20 years. I found that I had moderate to severe cervical dysphasia. Not cancer, but cancer’s next door neighbor. I had surgery to get it removed. If I had waited, I’d be dead by now from something totally preventable.

Fear and ignorance could have killed me.

Now I’m going to a chiropractor. My friends are now saying what they’ve always said about chiropractors. They are quacks. They insist you come a lot and they don’t promise anything. They heard of somebody who got paralyzed by one. But if I’d gone to a regular doctor for my slipped disc a week ago I would have been given pain pills and muscle relaxers. I still would have had a slipped disc. I just wouldn’t have cared.

I’m sure there are true stories of chiropractors who have accidentally harmed patients. But how many regular doctors have perfect records? There is a reason medical malpractice insurance is expensive. Nobody is perfect.

My chiropractor has a good point. We get our teeth checked twice a year, and if one of them goes bad we can get a replacement. We can’t replace our spine, yet we never check it.

Sure, I’m not happy about having to go several times a week, but it isn’t forever. It is just for a few months, then it won’t be that often. Plus, it feels amazing.

I like to think of my back as like a bonsai tree. Change can’t happen overnight. When I had braces it took 4 years to get my teeth straight. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and my back won’t be healed overnight.

Meanwhile I’m going to try to unlearn a whole lot of nonsense that I was taught, and try not to spread any more of it around.

Surgery – cut out the old ways of doing things

Posted on by | Leave a comment

One time I was in the recovery area after surgery. I didn’t have cancer, I had cancer’s next door neighbor. I was recovering after my surgery to remove the abnormal cells. The area was open so the nurses could keep an eye on everybody.

I had not had any mind altering drugs before my surgery. I didn’t want any Valium or anything like it. I didn’t want Versed either. That is an amnesia drug. My theory was that I have enough problems as is with reality because of my bipolar condition. I don’t need drugs messing with it too.

It is rare to refuse these medicines. If you have a surgery you’ll be asked what you are allergic to, and other than that it is free and clear for them to give you whatever they want. They want you calm and compliant. They don’t want you freaking out. So they commonly give these kinds of drugs.

Because I’d refused them, I was awake and alert while there. I didn’t hurt, and I was a little bored. There were others there in various states of recovering from anesthesia. There were cloth curtains separating the patients but no walls.

I overheard something two beds over. A doctor came up to the patient and told him that it was a lot worse than they thought. His cancer was a lot more invasive. They couldn’t get it all. He was going to have to have chemotherapy, and even that might not work.

This was heavy stuff. This was private. This was serious. This wasn’t something that should be said to someone in an open place, and by himself, and drugged up.

He had nobody with him. In the recovery area you are alone. He was most likely still not alert because of the standard drugs that are given. Thus he wasn’t really in a state to properly process this information. It is doubtful that he would remember it. Sure, they would soften the blow, but they might soften it so much that the words wouldn’t even be solid enough to stick. The words might slip right through and fall on the floor.

I felt for him. I didn’t know what to do, so I did what I always do these days when I don’t know what to do. I prayed. I prayed for peace and healing. I prayed that he had strength to hear these words. I prayed that the peace of God would descend on him and envelope him.

And I was angry. I was angry at the insensitivity of the doctor. I was wondering why he had to tell the patient then, there, in that way. He could have waited. He should have waited. That is some heavy stuff to tell to someone. What a way to punch somebody when he is down.

So I prayed some more. I couldn’t get up – I was attached to IVs. I was also naked under that flimsy hospital gown. I needed to lay still because I was being checked for bleeding. My surgery couldn’t have stitches. So I was stuck there.

But even if I could get up, what would I do? This is a stranger. What would I say? I can’t make it go away. I couldn’t heal him. Maybe I could let him know he wasn’t alone. Maybe I could tell the doctor that he needs to try being human for a change, try to see things from the patient’s perspective.

This was three years ago. I don’t know the resolution. I don’t know if the patient is still alive. I don’t know if the doctor has changed his ways. But I write this anyway, hoping that my words reach out across time and space to speak to some other doctor. Consider your words, and when, and how.

There may be no good way to tell someone that they are far more sick than you thought. You may be uncomfortable with your own mortality, so it may be hard for you to tell someone else about theirs. Breathe into it. Pray into it. Feel it out. Get counseling. Get training. You’ll be doing everybody a favor – including yourself.

Body mind and spirit aren’t separate.

Some doctors get into medicine because they like to know how the human body works. They want to fix things. But bodies aren’t like cars. You can make all the systems work, but the person is part of it too. She has to be a part of the healing. She has to change her ways, otherwise she will end up sick again. She has to want to get well, and work towards it. The doctor is part of this process and can help inspire the patient or can crush her spirit. What is said, and how, and when, is critical. Yes, doctors are human too, and make mistakes. That is normal. We make mistakes and we learn from them.

Consider the idea of making the patient have to come back to your office to find out bad news from test results. Sure, you don’t want to tell him over the phone. But making him take time off from work, drive downtown to your office in bad traffic, have to find a parking space – and then have to drive back in bad traffic, back to work, after hearing that he is very sick – isn’t that great. It is very hard on the patient. It makes a bad situation worse.

Perhaps you could come to him, and meet him? Whatever happened to house calls? Whatever happened to the doctor having time to talk with the patient, and having time to listen?

We need to rethink the whole thing. We need to focus on prevention and not treatment of symptoms. We need to focus on keeping people healthy rather than dealing with them being sick. We need to teach healthy living as a lifestyle instead of a quirk.

The quick fix versus the long haul.

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I had a dream last night that I was in the hospital. I was waiting on some procedure to be done and noticed that this hospital had a snack area for visitors. There was free food available for them while they were waiting. It was simple stuff – nothing that required cooking or plates or utensils. Purely grab and go.

I thought this was a very kind idea. Then I started studying the offerings. It was mostly cookies and chips. It was all simple carbs, with lots of salt and sugar thrown in for “flavor”. While it was nice that they were offering something, they weren’t offering anything healthy. There were no fresh fruit or protein offerings. All of it was quick-fix, not long-term.

Anybody who has ever been on a long hike before the advent of “energy bars” knows about gorp. Gorp is a strange name for a useful thing. It is a mix of M+Ms, raisins, and nuts. You’ve got something in there for quick, medium, and long-term energy, in that order. If you’ve ever been on a long road trip you’ve had to use something similar. If you try to last long on just caffeine and chips you’ll be crashing soon.

Then my thought was if the hospital offered good food, would people eat it? If the hospital staff follow the same parameters of stuff that is easy to store and prepare, then they could offer string cheese, nuts, and bananas and apples. The shelf life is shorter on these, so they might have some waste. And people when in stressful situations often go for the old standbys. They don’t think about what their body needs, they think about what they want. They want quick comfort, the quick fix. It would be better to not even offer chips and cookies at all.

I see so many people that when they take a break at work they grab a soda and cheese crackers. One of my basic rules is never eat anything that has an ingredient list longer than the “food” item itself. It has taken years of deprogramming, but I’ve learned that the best snack for me is an apple, some nuts (either sunflower or almonds) and some water. It is a middle of the road snack – nothing to rev me up.

Eating is like balancing with yoga. If you are trying to do tree pose and you start to wobble, overcompensating with a shift of weight or a wiggle of the ankle too far is going to make you fall. It is about little shifts, and finding the middle. If you try to overcompensate your feeling tired by drinking caffeine all the time and eating salty or sweet snacks that are full of simple carbs, you are going to crash soon. Then you have to have more. It is a horrible cycle of crash and burn.

Then I remember this dream was in a hospital. Western medicine does a laughable job at taking care of the person’s health. I’m not sure why Western medicine is seen as being superior. Sure, we have a lot of money invested in it. Sure, our doctors get paid a lot of money and our hospitals look like something out of a science-fiction set. But there is absolutely nothing long-term. There is nothing about health to be found in a hospital.

Western medicine treats the symptom and not the cause. Go in with a cough and you’ll get cough medicine. The doctor won’t even notice or care that you smoke two packs of cigarettes a day. Go in with diabetes and they will say “here’s your insulin”, not “here’s your nutritionist and exercise coach.”

Our medical industry is about reacting to the problem rather than preventing it. It is quick-fix. Its plan is to cut out the tumor, but let you keep eating junk food while sitting on the couch all day.

Now sure, you can’t make people be healthy. You can’t make someone eat well and exercise. You can’t make them be intentional about their lives. But how much of that is caused by our current American mindset? How much of that is just how we have been trained? We’ve been taught to take a pill to fix it. We’ve been taught to place our fate in the hands of “experts.” We are slowly starting to wake up to the fact that just because someone is an authority figure, it doesn’t mean that she or he is an expert. This applies to everyone – teachers, politicians, doctors, ministers – everyone who talks to you as a lesser-than, everyone who assumes you can’t handle your own life and won’t give you the tools to do it yourself.

This country was founded on the idea of freedom – freedom to practice religion as wished, freedom to self-govern, freedom of expression. Sure, it concerns me the amount of freedoms that are being taken away from us. The new information about how our every move and click of the mouse is being watched is deeply concerning. But I’m more concerned with how much we have given away. We’ve become passive consumers, rather than active participants in our own lives. We are allowing ourselves to be molded by advertising and by culture.

Turn off the TV. Go for a walk. Disconnect yourself from your iPod, your Kindle, your Gameboy. They may be wireless, but there is a cord nonetheless, and that cord is around your throat and your mind. Don’t do anything unless you have examined it yourself and found it to be true and helpful. But most of all, take care of your body by eating well and exercising daily. That is the best tool for your kit.

A million dollars worth of enlightenment.

Posted on by | Leave a comment

What would you do if you were given a million dollars? A lot of people say that they would give it to charity. They’d spend it on something good or worthwhile – defeat cancer, solve hunger, stop war. Maybe they’d also give some to family members who were in debt.

Sometimes I think they are lying for the sake of sounding like they are nicer than they are. Would any of us, really, give away all that money to help others? Wouldn’t we spend some of it on ourselves first? I know I would. Perhaps I want everybody else to be honest. Or perhaps I don’t want to think I’m the only selfish person around.

Sure, I’m not entirely self-centered. I want to learn how to do conflict negotiation. I want to be a peacemaker. Learning how to do that will take time and money – and I won’t get that money back. The peacemaking I’ll do will be for free. And I want to learn how to perform life-cycle ceremonies for people, like weddings and funerals. There are plenty of people who need these ceremonies but they don’t belong to a faith community. I would perform those ceremonies for free. The classes and time to learn how to do that are not cheap, however.

If a million dollars came my way I’d show it a good time. I’d pay off the cars and the house. I’d build a storm shelter in the basement. I’d put away a large chunk in savings. I doubt I’d quit my job because I like having some structure to my days, but I might go part time and spend the rest of the time taking classes or volunteering. I certainly would take more time to work on my art.

But I wouldn’t just give it away. There are so many things that might be helped with a judicious application of money, but they won’t be cured. Throw a million dollars at the homeless problem and you’ll just have another batch of homeless people in a year. Throw a million dollars to solving child abuse and you’ll have more abused children later. Sometimes it isn’t about money, but about attitude. So often we are trying to fix something with a band-aid when really only an amputation will cure it. So often we treat the symptom rather than the cure.

I’ve heard of people making “blessing bags” for homeless people. The bags have food for a day, along with toiletries and some underwear and socks. That is something – and I’ve long said it is better to do something than nothing. But that is only for that day. And meanwhile, the person still will be sleeping in the cold and the rain.

Maybe it is the yetzer hara speaking. Maybe I’m getting frustrated because I think the goal should be to prevent people becoming homeless, and I can’t figure out the solution. But I also want to prevent people becoming drug addicts, or bullies, or child abusers, or rapists, or prostitutes. I want to prevent the problem, and it seems so much bigger than I can possibly get my head around. I’d rather prevent someone becoming a child abuser than say I want to prevent child abuse. See the difference? It is the difference between teaching women to not be a target for a rapist, and teaching men to not rape. The person being attacked has a problem, certainly. But the person who is the attacker has a problem too. Stop the problem at the source and you’ve fixed two problems rather than one.

I have some ideas about this. The attacker feels lesser-than. The attacker feels that the other person has something that they need. The attacker often does not feel that the other person is a person at all – and that is why it is OK to attack them. Empathy is part of the solution. How do we teach this?

I don’t think money is the cure for this. I think some of it is an attitude shift in our society that needs to help people feel comfortable expressing themselves. They also need to be comfortable with other people being different and having different opinions. Teaching people dialogue versus debate would be helpful. But that isn’t money, but time and mindset. It is time for a different way of thinking.

Money just short-changes growth. It is like putting training wheels on a bike. You may be able to ride that bike, but you don’t really have the balance necessary. You haven’t built up those muscles yet. You ran right past the experience of falling down (many) times. So you can ride, but you have to have the training wheels to do it, and you can’t empathize with people who had to do it the hard way.

I’ve heard that people who have a lot of money are the least likely to volunteer or to donate money to charity. Perhaps something about having it easy makes it harder to understand those who have it hard.

Car. (prevention is cheaper than cure)

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Prevention is cheaper than cure.

We all know what is necessary to get healthy. Yet so few of us do it. What is the impetus that causes some people to take matters in their own hands and be active about their health?

Fear of disease motivates some, but for some that causes a return to old ways. They are worried about their health, but the only tool they have for dealing with worry is bad for them. So they eat the wrong things or smoke or drink. The reason for their ill health is from too much of bad things, and too little of good things. The things that they use for comfort are the very things that are causing the problem that they need comfort about. It is a horrible cycle.

Then some people have spent so much time being miserable that they are afraid of change. They would rather continue to be miserable than try something new.

Change is scary.

If you are walking on a road with no cars on it, you don’t realize that you need to move over to the side of the road. You’ve never seen a car. You might have heard stories about cars, and about how dangerous they are, but you’ve never seen one yourself, so you don’t know for sure.

They won’t run you down, certainly.

So then you walk along a little further. You see a person on the side of the road. She’s been hit pretty badly before, but she’s limping along. She’s got a cane, and she’s still walking.

She tells you about the car that hit her. She got away with just a broken leg.

You may think, boy, she is unlucky, but that won’t happen to me.

Then you walk a little further, and you see someone who is in a wheelchair. He tells you about the car that hit him. Maybe you start to think there might be something to this car thing that you should take seriously – but you still haven’t seen one yet.

Then you walk a little further, and you start to see someone on the side of the road. He’s dead. And you look ahead, and you see more and more people who are hobbling, and in wheelchairs, or dead.

Way up ahead you see people who are OK. They are not only walking, but they are running. They are enjoying this road. They are on the side, out of the path of the cars. They decided to take the warnings seriously.

You can’t get off this road. But you can stay out of the way of the cars.

The cars are cancer. Diabetes. Heart disease. They are coming. They are big, and they hit hard.

Our society suffers from way too many preventable diseases. We are number one, alright, in obesity. We eat too much, and too much of the wrong thing. We gorge ourselves on doughnuts out of our desperation. We drown our sorrows with our friend Jack.

We were sold the image of the Marlboro Man, all tough and rugged. He didn’t look so tough in the cancer ward, hooked up to oxygen and chemo drugs. He died, telling people that they needed to know how dangerous cigarettes are.

A car is coming. Get out of the way.

You know what is necessary. We know all the don’ts.

Don’t smoke, don’t eat too much meat (if at all), don’t eat fried foods. Drop caffeine and processed sugar. Avoid alcohol and drugs.

But what do you do? Those are things we use to comfort ourselves. We self-medicate with food.

Learn anger management. Breathe deeply and consciously. Take yoga. Go for a walk. Take up a hobby. Journal. Practice compassion and forgiveness – towards yourself and others. Eat vegetables. Have a rainbow on your plate. Get enough sleep. Make time to spend with friends.

This stuff that is stuck in your head has to get out somehow. There are safe ways to get it out.

Perspective is important.

There is a story about a person walking towards a town. He sees another man walking away from the town and asks him about it. He says it is terrible. The people are mean, the houses are small, and the food is bland. He walks on a little further. He sees another man walking away from the town and asks him the same question. The man says that the people are nice and the food is amazing. It is the same town.

This can be a wonderful journey or a terrible one. The choice is yours.

The car is coming. Choose wisely. You aren’t special, and you aren’t lucky. It will hit you if you aren’t mindful. Be mindful. Don’t wake up 10 years from now and wonder how you got so sick and out of shape. Take the time now.

It isn’t easy. It is OK to take baby steps first. Ease towards the side. Start walking a little. Start eating better. Nobody changes overnight. But head that way.

Car.

Get out of the way.