Why?

The other day a friend quoted Neale Donald Walsch (of Conversations with God fame) on her facebook page:

"Why?" is the most useless question in the universe. The only question with any meaning is "What?"

Asking "Why is this happening?" can only disempower you. Asking "What do I want to make of this?" does exactly the opposite.

Here is a great secret: the ‘Why’ of anything is to produce the ‘What’ of everything.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard that. One of my spiritual mentors used to say give up wanting to know why; you don’t need to know why.

Yes I do.

As far as I am concerned there is no such thing as accident, random, chance, coincidence.  So I am always interrogating Life. My friend Glynis tells me that I over think and over analyse everything. I would say that I just see differently and want to know why things are like they are, especially if what I see does not make sense and/or seem absurd. It was the pursuit of ‘why’ which saved my life. In pursuing the ‘why’, I discovered the ‘what’.

Going back to my last post, When Sickness is Good Business, if I was told that my body was incapable of fighting off infections because it was resistant to existing drugs, my first question would be why. Why would the body develop resistance to existing drugs? I’m not sure that the medical profession can actually answer that, but one response so far has been that lowering anti-biotic use is critical to slowing the evolution of resistance. Now there's a major clue.

Excessive medication simply masks symptoms and even worse, disables the immune system. Only those who suffer with one of those auto-immune diseases know what a bummer it is to live with a compromised immune system. 

A good friend recently asked to use my health crisis experience as background for doing some work with the UK’s National Health Service, but my experience is so atypical it would not help her; I simply do not fit the mould. When my doctor told me that I would need to take four different drugs, including a Beta-blocker*, every day for the rest of my life, I ran like hell. That was simply not going to happen. 

The body's own healing mechanisms require support from agonists, not to endure a lifelong bludgeoning by antagonists, or alien enemy combatants (as Americans would say)which is what drugs are at the end of the day.

Five years later I’m still here, minus antagonists and doing very well thank you. But I had to go on a long tortuous journey to understand the ‘why’ around my symptoms and the nature of the silent killer disease that stalked me, in order to get the 'what' to do about it. This is a luxury that a public health service simply cannot afford and that's why my experience would not contribute to my friend's work.

Yesterday I watched the latest James Bond movie, Skyfall. Bond’s boss ‘M’ tells him that orphans make the best agents. She does not say why. I wondered whether whoever wrote the script knows why. Orphan children have no fear. The choice between between death-in-life (what my doctor was offering) and life-in-death is a no-brainer for orphans. They will always choose the road less travelled.


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*Beta-blockers also known as beta antagonists, beta-adrenergic blocking agents, or beta-adrenergic antagonists, are drugs prescribed to treat several different types of conditions, including hypertension (high blood pressure), angina, some abnormal heart rhythms, heart attack (myocardial infarction), anxiety, migraine, glaucoma, and overactive thyroid symptoms.

Related Post: When Sickness is Good Business

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