I love to read! Over the years I have read countless books. Been taken to amazing places all from the safety of my own couch. When I travel (off of my couch and out of the country) , I use books to guide me. I also love to read stories that take place in the places that I will be going to see if I can recognize any of the landmarks. Our bookshelves are filled with books that have been read and are now gathering dust. We have boxes of old books in the garage that I have planned on someday donating. My favorite genre is vampire novels, followed by historical fiction and then follow that with anything that seems to float across the home page of amazon. (God am I ever a sucker for amazon!). Ever since cancer entered my life, however, my reading has had to change. Now it's wading thru a sea of books on surviving cancer. Everything from the spiritual, to how your mind helps the healing process and of course, nutrition. On the nutrition side of things, one thing seems to be a reoccurring theme. Cancer thrives in an acidic environment and cannot tolerate an alkaline environment.
Could it be that simple? I found myself day dreaming about life in the near distant future where everyone is armed with a simple pH meter (much like the ones that diabetics carry for blood sugar). With a simple prick we could find out in a flash what our pH is and make the best decision for ourselves with that information. There is a problem there. Humans have a way of getting in the way of doing the best thing for themselves, myself included. I had the same thought that you are probably thinking right now. No, people want to live. They want to thrive! Really? A walk down Bourbon Street in New Orleans will tell you a different story. They want to escape. And not just once! They want to do it over and over again. And then when those people figure out that they have a problem with alcohol and start going to meetings they start (assuming that they didn't before) to smoke!
Looking back it is amazing to me that much of the drug consumption that happens is teens thru the thirty's. What were we escaping from? Life at that age is dazzling and new every day! It is a sad fact about humanity that we seek to alter our experience with drugs and alcohol, and yet every generation seems to do it. I was watching an educational show on Egypt and they found thru some of the experiments that one of the mummy's had a toxic level of opium in his bone, suggesting that he was an addict. It went on to say that there were several accounts of drug use in the ancient civilization. Same with Rome. As it turns out, the history of the world has been a druggie, boozie one! It seems like the only time we want actually want to thrive is when we get sick. And then once well off we go for another round (and yes, this time I do mean at the bar). At some point, the vast majority of us grow out of this behavior. Thanks most likely, to children, or possibly jobs and mortgages and an overall sense of needing to be responsible. And just being too tired to go out on a Friday night. Those drugs and alchohol really can take it out of you! In our middle ages though there is a concession. Prescription drugs! Pain killers especially. My own mom had a long relationship with Valium. Perhaps it is thru my mom that I have learned not to trust society to do the right thing. She was diagnosed with emphysema while I was a teen but kept smoking until it finally claimed her life some 10 years later.
That is certainly one part. The other is marketing! Messages get twisted and convoluted. Marketing can tell us to do anything and feel good about it. In spite of all of the evidence that corn syrup leads to diabetes, the corn growers have the stones to run an add saying that the body does not recognize the difference in sugar and corn syrup and that it is fine in moderation. How much frigging corn do you guys need to sale? I was under the impression that with the population explosion that there wasn't enough farm land. And aren't you now in the energy business? Are the vegetable fuels not taking off like you'd hoped? I get frustrated sometimes with all of this. It seems that here is really the way things work. I am a typical human. I want to eat tasty food and have fun. Of course I work at a job I hate, but as long as I can eat tasty food and have fun that's OK. So I eat fast food. It is salty and crunchy and cheap. I think I'll smoke, because it helps calm me down when I realize how much my job sucks.Then on the weekends I'll go out with my friends and get drunk. We'll bitch about our jobs and the lack of great restaurants. Rinse and repeat! No wonder we get sick. We are living sick lives. It seems that for so many people I have know that was the case until they had children. Then they have something to live for! That's good! But I for one still think it's sad. I'd like to think that they're is always something to live for. I know that there is. And I don't mean to get down on the human race for doing stupid things, that is how we learn, sometimes. I would love to see us learn to be healthy though. Not needing a diagnosis to tell us to change our lives. I also don't mean to get down on companies who are profitable for spending money helping people. The Ronald McDonald house is a wonderful thing, but what if there were no fast food and people eat a healthy diet. Maybe there would be no need. Just as there would be no need for public service announcements for cigarettes.
That's why we have the ability to fantasize! Dream of the perfect life. And whether that perfect life is one of travel or lived out in a Tuscan village, or a beautiful house and with a small farm and some dogs and goats. They are our fantasies. I think that our fantasies can provide the kick start to our healing. Simply by asking the question do I really want that? If the answer is yes, then coming up with a plan to make it a reality. There you go: instant something to live for". Then we release the other problem. We hate to fail, so we don't try. Our fantasies become weapons upon our lives. We live out these lives that we find only tolerable, while trapping ourselves in fantasies that will never be fulfilled. Sometimes because we are too afraid of even sharing the ideas. My husband or wife would think I'm crazy! It occurs to me that everyone I've ever said "Man you are crazy too" was someone that I looked up to! I have been pretty lucky. My partner has accepted my fantasy and hopes as much as I do that it become reality. (In no small part because it would include him not having to work in a 9-5 grind. Simply put I want to be a writer that can support his household on his writing. I am risking putting it out there because now I'll be pressured to do it. "did you write today? Did you send that off to any publishers? Why is the laptop cold?" I thrive on pressure like that and will gladly trade if for my current, did you drink your juice? Did you take your meds. At this moment I have no intention on writing books about cancer or people with cancer. And while it might happen at some point, my current work involves an interior designer who buys a house haunted by the spirit of a woman with very particular ideas about her home. That being said, it is not a a horror story or a comedy. Just a story about how sometimes you can make a home and sometimes that home can make you. I plan on living to finish that and several other books that I will be bugging you all to buy so I can support our beautiful home, our dogs, chickens and goats. It may not be your definition of simple life, but it is mine and I plan on having it!
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