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.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
*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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When a President Cried

Image
At a time of year when Christians around the world are commemorating the birth of the Divine Child, some parents in Newtown , Connecticut , USA are mourning the death of their children. There are probably hundreds of children around the world – in under developed countries, in conflict zones – who will die every day up to Christmas and beyond. But right now the focus has been on what one British newspaper described as a massacre of innocents. How horrendous to lose your child in such a manner. Schools should be one of the few places where you expect your children to be safe.   I worked with several of the paramedics who were first on the scene dealing with the carnage on the trains at various metro stations after the 2005 London bombings. Many, especially the younger ones, suffered severe post traumatic stress. Not trained for such horrors, those teachers immediately on the scene at that school in Connecticut will carry the scarring from that day for some time. ...
Read more

Personal Health: Reflections in a Global Mirror

Image
{Revised November 2022} This blogpost, first written in 2013, has been revisited in the light of an apparent 'awakening' to the urgency of an impending climate catastrophe.  Currently ( 6 to 18 November 2022)  our illustrious leaders are at the 27th Conference of the Parties to the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change' (COP27) being held in Egypt. Opening the Conference, António Guterres, Secretary General of the UN said we are on the “highway to climate hell”. That received some interesting responses, including mocking derision. (See [3] below.  We are still talking instead of doing.  When will we get to serious adaptation, upscaling infrastructure to mitigate the impact of climate change and save lives? We are told that as things stand right now, current climate policies will condemn the world to a disastrous 2.8-degree temperature rise by the end of the century. Our collective goal is to limit that rise to 1.5 degrees. Whilst we are getting there... Gree...
Read more

Tough Love in Winter

Image
Yesterday I talked about ‘Big Mama’s’ tough love (The Shape-shifter Reloaded). Today I wanted to share just a snapshot of such an experience, which began at a point when I had just arrived at the foothills of healing.   As the years went on – 5 of them to be precise – I understood that this process will continue for the rest of my life because temptation is with me everyday.   I have to be vigilant because I simply cannot afford to go back to the old ways. Whenever I do slip, I simply observe and acknowledge it; tomorrow is another day.                But that's not all. Mother Nature's healing also confers gifts as an expression of her gratitude, because when we heal ourselves, we also heal the earth; and when we heal the earth we heal others.  So watch out for Gifts of Healing, might be the title of a book I can feel emerging.        The big free...
Read more