ACE UP YOUR SLEEVE

The opening of my upcoming book ACE UP YOUR SLEEVE:

Chapter 1

LIFE: BRIEF OVERVIEW

The following very brief overview of life encompasses your childhood, adolescence, death and taxes, sex, children and family, moral vicissitudes, aspirations, walks under the moon, success or lack of it, the mundane, the excitement, long vacations and the Late Night Show. It also addresses your health in no uncertain terms. Here it is, the brief overview of life:

You are screwed (but sometimes its fun).

Chapter 2

AN ACE UP YOUR SLEEVE

Unless you want to be a statistic, you need an ace up your sleeve. We all do. Otherwise, you can expect your life to hover somewhere in the proximity of the statistical average, where you will get pretty much whatever everybody else is getting, which could be summarized as getting screwed. Enough aces up enough people’s sleeves, on the other hand, would raise the statistical averages to a point we could all live with. But the averages currently being what they are, being a statistic is nothing to jubilate about.

Looking at a guy on a dialysis you think, “I hope this never happens to me.” Chances are it won’t, since only one out of every 650 of us is on a dialysis, but that one who is currently being dialyzed had his own hopes that it wouldn’t happen to him. But it did. Inevitably. One out of the 650. Statistics.

Your chance of falling a victim to clinical depression as an adult is about one in fifteen. About five out of every six of us in the United States become a victim of violence at least once in our lifetime. That is pretty damn near but not quite everyone. One out of 133 in the US is murdered. So out of the approximately 40,000 babies currently born in the US every day, like today, for instance, about 300 will end up murdered, their hopes for happiness squashed like an empty coke can flattened by a passing car. This is life in the domain, where Statistic is the Queen and we are her distraught and disloyal subjects.

Dressing in layers and eating kale is the right thing to do, but it is already built into the statistics, it isn’t anything up your sleeve. In other words, the datum that about one out of ten of us will catch a flu this year already includes the fact that some of the ten eat kale and dress in layers and some take vitamins or never leave home. These are not added, rare or unusual factors that may drastically affect the statistic, because they are already a part of the conditions of the existing statistic. Dressing in layers and eating kale is being smart and successful within the statistic, but that is not an ace up your sleeve. A magic wand or a spell warding off disease would serve as great examples of an ace up your sleeve.         

Imagine the map of the universe with an infinitesimally small dot representing our cosmic back yard, say just the Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Andromeda Galaxy. Okay, let’s throw in the Small Magellanic Cloud as well. Now, let’s zoom in on our very own puny galaxy, the Milky Way, with its 200 billion stars. Zooming right along, we get our Solar system into focus, which is only a hundred-and-eighty-six million miles across with Sun in the center. That is a hundred-and-eighty-five million, nine-hundred-ninety-nine thousand seven hundred miles further than LA from my home. Supernovas, black holes, dark matter—things are happening on a cosmic scale out there. But by the time we zoom in enough to view you, we would be looking for the most powerful microscope to even begin discerning you from the background among the tiniest of specks in the Universe. That is one big-ass Universe. With capitalized “A” and “U.”      

Fortunately, we don’t have to handle things out there at the Magellanic cloud. Our problems are microscopic. All we have to deal with here and now is a bad liver or stress at work and gaining that beachhead at the home front. We deal with various upsets and problems of everyday life—health-related or emotional. There are pressures; there are battles we fight; there are rare victories and commonplace defeats. Our insecurities, our made-up or real disabilities and shortcomings all play into that. Life is stressful enough as it is but with all that, with every passing second we are getting closer to death, too. We are losing and we are running out of time. Pressure. It should not be that way.

But we are getting closer to death with every passing second, right? Right. But that does not mean that life turns into a tragedy in the making. You do not have to get sicker and sicker and succumb to processes considered irreversible. Let’s say, your eyesight starting to go and getting progressively worse and never gets better. Does not have to be that way. Or a kidney problem even at an advanced age does not have to grow into a kidney disease and into a kidney failure and all kinds of other problems like in a domino effect. And add diabetes to that, throw high blood pressure into the mix, a heart failure… This is living a life of being screwed. No fun. 

Although not problems of cosmic proportions, in our estimation, we are confronted with formidable difficulties. What do we normally do when facing a health condition or emotional difficulty, a depression, general sense of disappointment and misery in life? Do we learn how to attack it head-on? Do we solve the hell out of it? Of course not. We are too weak for that. We don’t know what to do and how to do it and we are too tired to find out. We don’t kick the water enough, we just drown. We find experts and have them solve our problems. That is how the problems go unsolved. That is the way to be a statistic.

An ace up your sleeve is your own ability to heal yourself—emotionally, spiritually, physically, economically, sexually, you name it. You need that ability. You need that ace up your sleeve. 

As spirits, we can heal the body, we can make the body sick and we can kill the body. Speaking about healing, there are many ways a spirit can very effectively heal a body, especially his or her own. This is what this book is about.