Today
is Day Two of Week Four of the Omer. That is Twenty-three Days of the
Omer. The Theme continues to be Happiness.
Last week, we were
driving home from visiting someone and I turned to Clara and asked: Why is it that almost everybody we know is
physically sick, whilst we’re consistently healthy? We had just met someone who was suffering
from Crohn’s Disease. The point of my
question was unambiguous. Not only most
of our friends and people we meet in the course of my work, but members of our
respective families, all suffer from various maladies and are dependent upon
all kinds of medications and regular treatments to make their lives bearable
and productive. The two of us have been
to the doctor once each in the four years we’ve lived in Australia: me for a knee pain that I feared was a torn
ligament at the time but proved to be nothing revealed on an MRI and which went
away after a few months; and Clara for a vision deterioration that frightened
her for a few weeks but which tests could not pin down and also went away with
time.
I drove away from this meeting
wondering why the stark contrast between, again, almost everybody we know, and
Clara and me. We come from families full
of members with all kinds of physical complaints, so it’s unlikely
genetics. And our lifestyle isn’t
anything that special. We are fortunate
to have a gym adjacent to our unit and we use it perhaps three times a week for
relatively mild exercise. Every now and
then, we’ll swim some laps in the pool, also conveniently adjacent to our
unit. We walk fairly regularly, but not
at a blistering pace or to epic distances:
more like relaxing strolls. Our
diet is reasonably healthy but not really deliberately so. Although Clara has no sweet tooth whatsoever,
I love chocolate. We can scarf down hot
chips with the best of them, with plenty of the fake chicken salt, loaded with
MSG, on them. Yum! We’re certainly carrying at least a handful
of spare kilograms around. Look, I hope
you don’t think I’m bragging; that’s certainly not my aim! Rather, as we were driving back home I turned
to Clara and posed the question, because we are after all in the business of
helping people. And if we’ve stumbled
upon some secret that keeps us exceptionally healthier than many others around
us, we should want to share it with others.
Clara is the one in the family with
the medical smarts: she worked for many
years as a registered nurse, has a master’s degree in intensive care and
follows current trends in medicine even though she has not worked in hospital
in some years. She explained to me about
Crohn’s Disease; it is a disorder of the digestive tract, which makes its
sufferers often unable to eat normally without painful and embarrassing
consequences. Over the years, we’ve
known a number of people who suffer from it.
Is it nerves? I
asked. Is it caused by people tying
themselves up in knots emotionally? Clara
said that it’s one of those conditions that really cannot be pinned down as to
cause. It is a young person’s disease,
striking people for the first time most often between the ages of 15 and 25
years. Clara allowed as how, like many
bona fide medical conditions whose source cannot be traced, Crohn’s like many
other ailments certainly may be brought on – at least in some cases – by
emotional stress.
As we talked about emotional stress
and its deleterious effects on physical health, I thought about all the people
we know who are clearly unhappy with their lives and how they tend to suffer from
all kinds of medical conditions. Crohn’s
is just the start of the list. We know
so many people with debilitating pain and health issues who are also people who
stress endlessly over their lives. We
also know a few people who, like us, suffer from very few maladies – and some
of them are in their 80’s and even 90’s.
And every one of these healthy individuals displays signs of having
conquered, certainly in part, the Happiness challenge.
Clara tells me that many doctors
have been unafraid to state publicly the positive effects on medical health
that come from a positive state of mind, and the opposite. I’m personally not a believer in faith
healing. If, G-d forbid I do get
sick, please take me to a doctor! Not to
a chapel or a reading room. Having no
medical training myself, I hope that my speculations on the subject do not make
me sound like someone with a penchant for quackery. But after thinking long and hard about it, I
am convinced that Happiness has a profoundly positive effect on one’s health. And misery has a profoundly negative effect.
Keep striving for Happiness, and be
healthy and well! Amen.
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