The ABCs of Survival

Our understanding of the relationship of rest and immunity is evident in our language.  Idioms like “feeling run down”, “back against the wall” and “burning the candle at both ends” have been around for a while.  When the body’s unconscious, automatic fight or flight response isn’t active, the immune system is relaxed, maintaining all of its flexibility.  All’s well.  The guard is relaxed, but still on duty.  Downtime is essential for the body’s defenses to regroup and recharge, allowing for a wholehearted defensive response in the face of an imminent threat.  This is why good sleep, along with good air, food and water, is so important.

The pursuit of happiness isn’t available without ready access to the alphabet of survival.  The word alphabet is taken from its first two letters, alpha and beta, which in turn represent food and shelter.  The Phoenician letter that became our “A” meant ox, a beast of burden for growing crops.  And beta symbolized the floor plan of a house. I’m arbitrarily assigning the letter “c”, a letter that Benjamin Franklin campaigned to have removed from English, as the air we breathe.  Let’s make it “c” for  “con-spire”, as in the air we “together + breathe.” This trio is the ABCs of survival.

Living in a neighborhood with no fresh produce, or unaffordable fresh produce, will result in a weaker immune response.  The same goes for air pollution and the safety of your drinking water.  If Flint, Michigan were a wealthy white neighborhood, the Army Corp of Engineers would’ve swooped in and fixed those poisonous pipes years ago.

Food is very personal for most of us.  We don’t like to hear that sugar (One-month sugar detox: A nutritionist explains how and why) and alcohol tax our ability to fend off disease. But for those of us who can afford healthy food close to home, we do have an enormous amount of agency in our well-being.

At the personal level of our bodies, this singular viewpoint of finding “the” problem and “fixing it”, discards the unmatchable, innate healing capacity of a the body.  The primary goal of Chinese medicine is to unify the whole, beginning with addressing root causes, rather than simply neutralizing an offending symptom.  This unifying perspective, however, does require more responsibility regarding lifestyle choices.  It also demands that we recognize that so many of us don’t have the same readily available choices.

If any of the ABCs are lacking in quality or availability, the likelihood and severity of any disease increases.

Read on with The Air We Breathe