At 42 you would think that I would have figured “it” out by now. The “it” being what it takes to be a human being. All I know for sure is that I do not want to give up on being human. Being human, having “human-ness”...whatever the hell that means? Everything is being done for us: pills, plastics and large screen TVs...that's all we seem to need.
Heard a quote last week (sorry for forgetting who said it) and it went something like this: “Transformation happens subtly in the unconscious before it’s ever felt in the intellect”. I like it. It got me thinking about simple solutions that I stumbled into over the past couple of years on how to live with this disease.
My greatest hits of simple solutions includes water, walking, breathing and eating real food; the type of food that you would imagine the Garden of Eden had sprouting up all over the place.
I am not sure but I imagine water, walking, breathing and eating could be a formula for being human. At best it's a blueprint on how to live on this planet as long as you're not a fish. Toss in some consciousness with a little contemplation and I think I could be on my way to figuring “it” out. “Human-ness.”
When I look back over the past 50yrs I see the greatest achievements coming from the advancements in digital technology. It has brought us together. The more I write, the closer I feel to you. It feels more like a conversation than a blog post. Digital technology gave that to us. We are connected. I like that feeling.
The greatest failure of the past 50yrs? Processed food. What we call “food” is not food. With all the achievements in technology, medicine and science our food chain has created a generation of disease. A planet of obesity or starvation, with few in between those two extremes.
I write this after spending three days in bed getting over my latest episode of a Devics attack. Some people call them flare ups, exacerbations or an increase in residual symptoms. For me, I call it an attack because when it knocks me off me feet with a stabbing electric shock coming from inside my mid-spine, it’s an attack. Last month when it happened to me I described it in the following words…
“Friday night at 1:55am, fast asleep, little people climb inside of me. Down my throat, they pass my heart to settle inside the middle of my spine. They pull out a taser, the kind police use at riots to shock the unruly into submission. The little people start zapping and shocking my spine with large amounts of electricity. I convulse, I clinch all the muscles in my body at once, I flop around back and forth. Think of the image of a man in the electric chair. It’s like that but I’m lying in bed flat on my back. This goes on for three minutes, then the little people stop. I lay there breathless, scared, aware of the pummeled totality of my insides. I can feel not only my heartbeat but the entireness of my heart. I can feel the the complete circumference of my heart, I can feel the whole of my lungs, I am aware of all the organs in my chest, they all sit there as if they were placed there as foreign objects.”
All of it was pretty much the same this time except I was awake and it lasted for about 15 minutes.
Why do I share this you? Because it’s the comeback story that’s worth telling.
For those of you following my work over this past year, you know about the life change that has occurred in me.
The above quote “transformation happens subtly in the unconscious before it’s ever felt in the intellect”. This is what I am getting at. My simple solutions have helped me with my quickest recovery to date. My body wants to live in a healthy state. Don’t get me wrong, I am still barely getting up on my feet and I just popped two Excedrin before writing this.
This takes me back to why digital technology is good and processed foods are bad.
Digital technology is good because now it is easier to share with each other. Six years ago when this started happening to me the internet was a little more than a phone book and bunches of scholarly articles. Facebook was still in diapers, my blog was a fetus and the closest I felt to being connected on the web was a pop-up ad that spiked my interest.
Today here we are: you read, I write, we exchange thoughts and even sometimes a letter. This is good.
Food is made fast, food is grown fast, in turn disease spreads fast in you. Next time you think you are eating food there is a good chance that you are actually eating carbon and nitrogen isotopes, ammonia rather than actual real food (Garden of Eden type of stuff). Why do they do this to food? To move it from factory to the table fast, and being able to do that doesn't just fatten our bottoms, it exponentially fattens their bottom line. The bulk of our meat and dairy is disease laden exactly because of this process.
So how do we kickstart transformation so it happens fast? We could log-on to our big plastic screen and see what the Google-God has to say. We could wait for the pill to kick in, numbing us away. OR we could go back to eating real food. Food that is the ingredient, not part of it amongst a gazillion ingredients we can't even read. Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” has two good rules of thumb that I follow to understand real food: one - would your Great Grandmother recognize what your eating as food? Two - only eat food with five ingredients or less in them (that you can hopefully pronounce).
That ends my rant for today. I would like to thank digital technology for helping me bring these words to you.
