My stomach was so upset last night it wouldn’t rest. So it went with the rest of me. Food feels like a foreign substance, and even my beloved juice doesn’t quite taste right. Now it is time to learn what my belly has been grumbling and burping about for so long.   Why is it that we learn to live with our discomfort so well that it takes a near emergency to get us to pay attention?

I know this- that this life is a shell of an activity when we don’t feel well. Our health is the only real barometer of what is real…. I saw the doctor today and learned that I fall into the majority with digestive issues. Turns out that the digestive tract is loaded with sensory neurons that speak an emotional language. The longer you live, the higher the percentage of people who feel their life battles in their abdomen somewhere.

On to the gratitude for the readily available, high level testing on expensive equipment which comes free of a copay. I still don’t get how we get this and more than half the world can’t get antibiotics, or heck, clean water. It stretches our unity as a species to be living at the extremes of how far we have come and yet how many we still leave behind.

It is hard to know what begets what. How can you improve your situation when you are sick from bad water or not enough food to feed the people you love? Often there is no work to strive to improve your situation, and thus plants the seeds of the vicious cycles of self medicating. How much courage and imagination does it take to stop believing in the external limits that life imposes.

All of these problems are health concerns that belong to all of us. Getting sick quickly teaches that.