As might be visible from my giant red nose right now, I have been sick, some kind of flu or something.
Not COVID, as far as the test says.
But being sick for a week or so really made me think about how this can change our state of mind.
I mean, really, when you’re in a healthy state, normal physical health, it really feels like this is an absolutely normal state.
And yet as soon as you’re not in a normal state of physical health, suddenly normal physical health becomes this kind of magical paradise.
I mean, it’s like wow, wouldn’t that be amazing, to not have such and such symptoms, to simply have no symptoms and feel completely normal? It’s amazing how we simply don’t appreciate anything that’s normal.
We see that a state of normal health is just sort of an automatic standard state, and then it’s anything that deviates from that that is the exception that we need to pay attention to.
Now from a practical point of view, makes perfect sense.
But it seems like really, the natural default state is not life at all.
It’s this sort of decay.
Decay is a natural default state.
Entropy, breaking down, losing the organization and sort of breaking down into simpler and simpler components.
That’s the natural flow of the universe.
And being alive, being a lifeform, we are working against that natural flow of entropy.
We are working to assemble very precise order and have everything work in a very precise way and resist the breaking down.
I mean, we see illness as an exception that breaks what’s normal, and yet illness is completely normal, and what’s amazing is how we’re able to resist illness.
When I get a virus, the virus simply is spreading and simply wants to live and is spreading anywhere that it can.
And you know, why not? It’s simply- it’s just another lifeform trying to reproduce and live wherever it can find a nice comfortable home.
And yet somehow, for most of us, most of the time, we are able to resist what all these different life-forms want, and say “No, this is my domain.
My body is my domain, where, you know, I don’t allow anything else to live.” Except, you know, maybe in the digestive system we can make an exception.
But we have such a highly tuned, perfectly calibrated state in an unbelievable level of complexity going on all the time.
Every day that we live at all, the complexity of what’s happening in our bodies, everything perfectly coordinated to an exact degree in the complexity of millions, billions of components and they’re all just working together so smoothly that we almost all the time don’t even notice them.
And even when we’re sick, really it’s only one little thing that’s off, and that makes us sick, when almost everything else is still working.
it’s really unbelievable the level of complexity and perfect synchronization that our bodies show.
So, yet another obvious point, but it’s something that when sick, that’s when it really helps to bring out this feeling that wow, maybe we can remind ourselves even on days when we’re perfectly healthy and feel normal, we can remind ourselves how amazing it is to have each of these components of our body working in exact order.
Each of the different things where like if just a single thing was off it would cause severe illness.
And yet most of the time, for most of us, they are all working together in perfection.
And it’s just one of those things that it’s so hard to notice because it feels so normal, and yet what an amazing normal to be part of.
#humanbody #healthisamazing #normalisamazing