The Body Electric

Kneeling over the commode this morning — courtesy of a new antibiotic that both the doctor and the accompanying literature on the samples failed to mention should be taken WITH FOOD — I was forcefully reminded of the body’s supremacy. The body will believe anything you tell it, so they say, but the body always talks back. Especially if it thinks you’re not listening.

My body and I have reached an uneasy truce: I’ve stopped feeding it junk (most of the time) and take it for walks and other forms of exercise, and it’s stopped a cycle of uncomfortable complaining. Oh, sure, it rattles my chain with headaches and joint aches (perhaps so I won’t forget it’s there) on a low-level, daily basis, but we’ve made great strides, my body and I.

And yet... someday it will let me down. Someday it will give out completely. I think about my uncle, currently listed as a paraplegic thanks to back surgery wherein the wound went so deep, they scraped bone to remove all the infected material. I know he has habitually ignored his body, including the numbness in both legs that put him in the hospital in the first place. Now we don’t know if the nerves will heal; we don’t know if he’ll ever walk again.

Perhaps these rudimentary forms hold us down, encasing and entrapping our minds, for a purpose --- like runners who wear extra weights during training, so that in competition, they seem to fly.

Perhaps we must learn to strike a balance for as long as we can, despite the foreknowledge that our efforts will be in vain.

Perhaps the medicine has hallucinogenic properties.

“Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” ~ Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back