The importance of exposure to maladies early in life

Disclaimer/Warning: This is a long and rambling article, written out in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, with little editing, with the express intent of helping those who can get to the end of reading it, by causing them to reflect upon whatever is said in it. It also gets a little personal, towards the end. Please read it at considerable possible risk to your comfort and convenience. You might regret the time you will have spent in reading it but then again you might not, and might actually benefit. In any case, the article recommends that those in their fifties, must ‘take pause, and reflect’, and ‘take it easy’, and reduce the need to keep ‘running around’ as in one’s thirties, but keep working, and accept the maladies that life throws at us.

Here goes………….

Just last week, a batch-mate from college who was out on a pleasure trip with a few other batch-mates, at a hill-station (Ooty) in southern India, hundreds of miles away from his home and family in Delhi, suddenly and shockingly lost his life to a massive cardiac arrest, while walking up an inclined road, upon a hill.

Reportedly, routine health check-ups hadn’t spotted any problem. With the exception of having had a diabetic condition (which is more common nowadays than almost every other disease), he had seemed reasonably healthy, right until his sudden demise. One imagines that if he had been ill, his family would not have favoured his going on that trip.

Many contemporaries born in the nineteen sixties are now at an important point of change in their lives; a point at which issues regarding health (which had appeared unimportant, or even irrelevant, at younger ages) have suddenly assumed significance. Most contemporaries have recently crossed the middle of their sixth decade upon the planet. Retirement from work (at 60, or 62, or 65, depending upon the nature of one’s employment) is still some time away for most, but almost everyone realizes that this remaining time will appear to pass away in the blink of an eye.

Time, as is often said, seems to pass faster and faster, as one ages.

The mid-fifties are when age- and/or lifestyle-related illnesses first seem to crop up. These can manifest as chronic conditions such as hyper-tension, hyper-glycemia, hyper-cholesterolemia, hyper-thyroidism, hypo-thyroidism, or coronary artery disease; OR as acute conditions such as infarcts, or bleeds; OR as one or more of a variety of conditions that can be chronic while having acute phases, such as cancer, infection, or inflammation of the brain, heart, liver, lung, kidney, pancreas, breast, blood, prostrate, uterus, ovary, testis, colon, spine, shoulder, knee or neck.

Here, I discuss two alternate types of health profiles at length, both of which are seen amongst people who are in their mid- to late-fifties. I have addressed them from the viewpoint of examining which might be considered better, on the whole; all things considered.

So I begin by posing two questions: (1) Is it better to be blessed with a perfectly healthy life for the entirety of one’s youth, and middle-age, and only thereafter to play host to various maladies, as one approaches the fifties or sixties?, Or (2) Is it better to play host to a steady (but infrequent) stream of non-life-threatening maladies that intermittently pay our bodies a visit, throughout one’s youth and/or middle-age, preparing us for the degeneration that must inevitably follow and potentially reducing the effects that these maladies have upon us?

These are simple questions that position what actually constitutes a spectrum of manifestations into a duality, rather deliberately. The questions interest many who are grappling with maladies of one kind, or another, ranging from cervical spondylitis to brain strokes and cancer. For understandable reasons, many would prefer to enjoy great health for a few decades, and only then to go through whatever life holds in store, hopefully with equanimity and acceptance; or at least that is the theory. For reasons that I discuss here, however, this possibility mostly remains in the domain of theory, and is hard to put into practice. Although, theoretically speaking, when one enjoys good health for most of one’s life, there’s always a possibility that one can use the memory of the decades spent in good health to compensate for whatever come thereafter, if and when maladies do eventually strike. In practice, this is just a fond hope. Not many people understand why, from an emotional angle, although they nod their heads after understanding it intellectually.

Well, at least, most people that I know tend to be quite poor at using their memories in this manner. Almost no one is willing to let go of the good times, when they happen to find that they have to. Few appear to possess the emotional maturity required for one to be grateful for everything that has already been received from life, and from providence, in the form of destiny, until this point in life; whether one is talking about health, wealth, or happiness.

The individual mind is a devil.

It receives, and goes on receiving, and takes whatever has been received for granted, never tiring of receiving from the hands of providence, constantly mouthing platitudes about feeling gratitude, but doing so extremely insincerely, and feeling no real gratitude.

The mind always wants more. Not just that. The mind wants more, forevermore. Its appetite is endless, and it is never satiated. It is a bottomless pit of wants and desires.

Thus, with most people, the more one has of something, e.g., good health, or wealth, or comfortable circumstances, the greater is one’s reluctance to let go of it, if and when the time does come, when one finds that one has to let go.

As a consequence of this, uninterrupted good health in the early decades of one’s life thus ends up becoming more of a curse than a blessing, for most people.

Let me expand on this theme, for a bit, at the risk of repeating some of the things that I have already succinctly mentioned above, merely to belabour the point that I am trying to make, to provoke a reaction in the form of an ‘Okay, we have already understood what you are trying to say here; just get on with it’. This is because emotional reactions have a greater impact than intellectual agreement with a viewpoint. Water puts out fire, whether it is hot and scalding, or cold and freezing. So, here goes….

Rare is the elderly person with good health who can be seen to submit easily to the process of aging, or to an easy acceptance of the fact that nothing lasts forever. Like death, aging always appears to be that which we think must inevitably happen to other people, but never to us. Thus, when we enjoy good health, the mind ends up taking it for granted, and assumes that things will always remain that way. What is not often realized is that when one enjoys great health for a long while, the mind also grows increasingly unable to deal with poor health, if and when one is faced with poor health. A mind that remains untrained to deal with variety in circumstances is a mind that has been wasted, no matter how good the circumstances of one’s life have happened to be, or promise to continue to be. Unlike what we think, we are not the ultimate arbiters of our destiny in any real sense. We think and propose. Providence disposes. The negative tendencies of the mind tend to destroy all imagined future advantages of one’s having enjoying a long period of good health in one’s past.

Indeed, if one is willing to reflect upon this aspect for just a little bit, this is also how it is with just about everything, in this world. Everything that gives some pleasure, including life in a human body, must also give pain when one loses that thing, with the pain often being in proportion to the pleasure that one happened to get, while living.

Life here is ultimately a zero-sum game for pure consciousness. Everything that is gained or lost here will be compensated for by its opposite. Our purpose is to gradually reduce, and not increase, the excesses of the opposites, in terms of the toll that they end up taking upon the minds that are our companions here, while still continuing to use such opposites, and while experiencing them, to keep the mind from assuming any particular stance, and to keep learning. It is a dicey game that we have to play. It is almost a given, therefore, that the mind will over-react, if and when ill health strikes after a long period of good health, in proportion with how unprepared the mind has grown to accepting a setback in health, with this also being in proportion with the good health enjoyed.

Thus, in order to stay grounded, and well calibrated, I propose, somewhat hesitatingly (since I know that this is unlikely to prove to be a popular view) that it is a blessing for one to alternate between periods of good and poor health, and a curse to enjoy an extended period of very good health. Let us take a couple of unrelated examples to understand this from several different angles. Many westerners (and even Indians who have lived abroad for decades) find that they are unable to deal with, or tolerate, the heat, dust, disorder, crowding, lack of hygiene, and apparent disarray that India still represents (note: this is so, despite India’s having made many strides in the decades since it became unshackled from the yoke of foreign rule and colonial exploitation). Indians who live in India, on the other hand, have grown used to it all, and don’t feel rattled to the same extent. This is because Indians have grown quite used to the entire spectrum of human conditions that presents itself to anyone living in India.

Therefore, in the cities of Delhi, or Mumbai, e.g., one might unwittingly step on some human excrement lying next to an untended and sprawling pile of garbage at one moment, and then find oneself inside a clean and swanky hotel, or an upmarket home (one in which someone may have caringly placed an orchid upon one’s pillow, and where lace curtains happen to line the windows), all within the space of an hour. Such a broad range in the variety of experiences that can potentially occur on a single day is simply not available, e.g., to someone living in Zurich, in Switzerland. In Zurich, the glass walls of even a public space, such as the city’s airport terminal, happen to be cleaner than the glass windows of any Indian home. What to speak of windows, even the bathrooms at Zurich airport are so squeaky clean that one could even pick up a fallen mango (already peeled, and being eaten) right off the floor of a stall, and then resume eating the mango, without risking an intestinal infection.

Of course, I am exaggerating wildly here, because invisible bacteria and microbes are everywhere, but I am doing it to make a point. For most people who have lived forever in Zurich, and never been exposed to India, I would wager that an Indian street would cause extreme discomfort, to the point of causing one to lose one’s mental equilibrium, if someone were to have to spend only a month living in India. On the other hand, it goes without saying that an Indian from India could very easily live in Zurich for a few years, and then return to live in India, or New Zealand, or Nigeria, or wherever, using the constant alternation of the qualities of experiences (the contrasts, if you will) to remain adaptable, and to ride out the vicissitudes of life, like a surfer rides the choppy waves near coasts that are treacherous.

Which would you say is better? To get used to everything happening exactly as one likes things to be, in terms of orderliness, cleanliness, and apparent predictability, even if this were guaranteed to cause one to simultaneously become more and more unused to facing, or dealing with, anything else, by way of relative disorderliness, lack of cleanliness, difficulty, or lack of predictability,

OR

To get used to nothing in particular, and to assume nothing about how any particular day might go, and to just be ready for anything, whether it be traffic, or the weather, or one’s sense of well-being?

Consider that mankind still has no real control over time, or over anything that time can cause one to experience, such as natural disasters, climatic disasters, economic disasters, technological changes, generational changes, or social changes.

Isn’t it better to remain adaptable to changes that could potentially occur, on any day, by remaining constantly exposed to a bit of variety, and some ups and downs in life, rather than to a dull monotony (however brilliant or convenient)? It is only because there is a night that we know what day is. If there were no night, we would not even know what is day, and we would take completely for granted the daylight that we use to see things with, making neither plans nor preparationfor the possible occurrence of night; no candles, no torches, no bulbs, no night-vision goggles. Who would then call us change-compliant, or even intelligent, if we were to get used to only functioning while it is day, and become disabled by night, without understanding that day and night must cycle?

Variety helps one to constantly calibrate one’s bearings. Too many years of a comfortable life extract their payment in terms of the abject misery that occurs when the good life passes (as it must, since everything must pass).

Some people think that consciousness ends with the death of the physical body. What one thinks does not really matter. Only the truth matters, and not what one thinks to be the truth.

Therefore, if the truth is that consciousness is extinguished with the body, one might as well not have lived in the first place, because it has no lasting impact upon the individual. On the other hand, if the truth is that consciousness outlasts the physical body, or that it continues on, and on, in finer bodies (or even without such finer bodies), then surely the payment that will be extracted from consciousness (in terms of the misery entailed in losing a comfortable existence as a human being) could well become postponed into becoming a payment extracted while inhabiting a different theatre of consciousness altogether; however, we must pay. Nothing is free. Life is a zero-sum game. Ill health must be compensated for by good health. All I am saying is that if they alternate frequently, it keeps us more fit than if they alternate over long time periods, e.g., such as over entire incarnations.

A life filled with variety, especially in terms of occasional bouts of poor health, can be great for developing detachment from one’s body, and its travails, as well as some detachment from the desire to experience physical existence again and again, especially once one has experienced everything there is to experience, and there remains nothing further to be learned, upon this planet.

Therefore, I find that I am infinitely grateful to providence for having caused me to have been born in India, where I was raised and encouraged to enjoy a panoply of alternating experiences, both large, and diverse, occurring sometimes within the same day, or even the same hour. It has taught me (somewhat, although there is still quite a way to go) to take nothing for granted, and to take tumult in stride, when it strikes (after all, what choice do we have, anyway?).

Change makes life interesting. Change makes one reflect more upon what it’s all about. Change shakes us up from the stupor that we tend to enter. Change shows us that the only real constant in life is change. It is easier for a human being to subjecting oneself to a narrowing of the spectrum of change than to subject oneself to having to broaden it. I propose, therefore, that it is much easier to temporarily narrow the spectrum of things that one is exposed to, when one has happened to maintain a broad base of exposure to different types of experiences (and acceptance of the same), in both health, and wealth. I propose that it is much more difficult to temporarily broaden one’s spectrum to take in the things that one has never gotten used to, if one has maintained a very narrow base; a very narrow specification of what one finds to be acceptable; such as uninterrupted good health.

The ability to adapt, and accept, decrease with age. Thus, it is better to be exposed to a diversity of health experiences in one’s youth and middle-age. To remain constantly exposed to a broader spectrum of possibilities from youth keeps human beings more detached from the desire to ‘always have it good’. To me, this appears to be why people in countries that are neither too rich, nor too poor, often appear to be more adaptable, and also happier. It’s because they are never really sure about anything. This causes the things that don’t kill them to make them stronger, happier, and more resilient in facing the world and whatever the world manages to throw at them. Many who live in countries in Asia and Africa experience a wide spectrum of conditions and experiences every day, within their own cities, and in their lives, e.g., within a few square miles, in the city of Mumbai.

So, I ask you, which is better for the mind? To live in Europe, or suburban America, and to get used to everything ‘always’ (or, as one needs to say nowadays, ‘mostly’) remaining in order, and predictably so, or to live in India and never really know what new surprises the day might bring with it, always challenging the mind, and presenting interesting challenges that keep the mind fit and agile, with the mind’s reactions also becoming more and more numbed and mellowed?

I would say once again, partly for the sake of form, that there are advantages and disadvantages to both modes of living. On the whole, though, I would say that one mode is much better for most people, all things considered. One mode keeps one more fit, both in terms of one’s ability to accept variations in one’s life, and in terms of one’s ability to handle such variations and to deal with them, preventing one from becoming unwilling to accept such variations, or submit to them, whenever things appear to be beyond one’s control. With the other mode, on the other hand, this ability (which is inherent in most humans when one begins one’s life) is progressively lost, as one grows used to life always remaining on an even keel. This even-keel type of life progressively reduces one’s tolerance to variations, decreases empathy for the experiences that others may be having, and increases one’s preference for a monotonic existence; putting comfort over challenge, conservatism over liberalism, and the familiar over the unfamiliar. The net learning from life, from such an existence, ends up being lower; to my mind, without question, although I remain entirely willing to debate the issue.

So, please don’t get me wrong here. I am not advocating that a life that is filled with constant and intense challenges is always better than a life that is filled with no challenges, or with fewer and milder challenges (of course, with intense and mild being extremely subjective, and quite undefinable). It is quite possible that some prefer to alternate experiences only between physical incarnations, rather than within a single physical incarnation, such that their swings of circumstances merely involve a larger time period, and less frequency of change. The point that I am making is that change is good, regardless of how often it occurs, but that frequent changes keep one on one’s toes and more alert to the fact that our lives here are really quite metastable, with an appearance of stability.

This is because change, and contrast, are the only things that we ever really learn from. For each personality type, it is possible that there is an appropriate time period with which change must occur, or be required to occur, for things not to go entirely crazy. All I am saying is that if the change comes, we must not allow it to upset one’s mental equilibrium. We must accept the change, and examine and introspect upon what it has come to teach us, especially if such change involves alternation between good and poor health. So, I am merely advocating balance. I am saying that too much of anything (whether good, or bad, in anyone’s judgement) is arguably less preferable to exposure to a lit bit of this, and a little bit of that; or, in other words, to a little bit of everything. Remaining exposed to a wider variety of physical, mental and emotional conditions causes one to develop more mental strength, resilience and acceptance, and brings more maturity, since experiences are really (ultimately) just exercises for the mind; exercises that help the mind to remain nimble, and fleet-footed; at least in the estimation of those who feel that the mind and the consciousness outlive the tenure of a physical body.

Now, to completely narrow the above discussion right down to the domain of health, one could argue, therefore, that good health for fifty or sixty years can end up spoiling many people completely. When maladies come, the response is an emotional and mental over-reaction. The mind has not been trained to calibrate itself, to deal with a wider range of possibilities.

If you are having trouble in accepting the above, think of the ‘uncle’ or ‘auntie’ from your childhood, who visited the doctor soon after retirement and was told, ‘Hmm, it looks like we are going to have to put you on a life-sentence of blood pressure medication’ based on a single reading of a blood pressure of 135/90 mm Hg, measured on an aneroid sphygmomanometer, one evening at the clinic.

The doctor is just taking no chances. The reading could have resulted from temporary anxiety. It could have resulted from the intrinsic inaccuracy of the instrument. It could have resulted from the rapid rate at which the pressure was released from the arm band, combined with the overconfidence of the physician, which prevented the making of an accurate measurement. It could have even resulted from the time of the day at which the measurement happened to be made. For someone whose natural variations of blood pressure have never been measured, such a reading would not necessarily even be bad, or wrong. Perhaps the uncle in question had so far led a great life, with a slightly higher than average blood pressure, all his life, without really knowing, because he never ever visited the doctor. In any case, consider that the European Union has recently raised the normal diastolic reading to 90, from the earlier specification of 80. In today’s times, physicians could even compliment a person in their fifties or sixties, for a blood pressure reading of 130/90 systolic/diastolic. However, the life of the proverbial ‘uncle’ during the nineteen eighties, or nineties, who heard about his life-sentence of blood pressure medication, got effectively spoilt, didn’t it? There was a palpable sense of ‘why me?’, quite uncalled for.

Imagine that this uncle also had a random blood sugar reading of 170 or 180, and the doctor had commented upon it being too high. His spouse, the ‘auntie’ would immediately insist on stopping all use of salt, oil and sugar, in their food at home. Bereft of food with the taste necessary to cause salivation (which helps in chewing and digestion), the said ‘uncle’ would obsess constantly about his blood pressure and blood sugar readings, and tell all his other retired friends about it. Within two years, he could potentially develop coronary arterial disease from all the stress, and the worry, about the blood pressure, and the blood sugar, adding to his own feelings of insufficiency, and inadequacy, following retirement from an active work life. Would it be too much to imagine that such an uncle could suddenly pass away one day, from an unanticipated myocardial infarction? Don’t we all know a few such uncles, and aunties? Aren’t we all also slowly ourselves becoming these uncles and aunties? What then was the use of all the prior decades of good health, when life did not teach the uncle in question to prepare, even for a ‘not-at-all-bad’ reading of blood pressure?

Similarly, during the recent pandemic, very many people became experts quite suddenly on the blood saturation of oxygen, with their own opinions about what constitutes a good percentage and what does not, based on hearsay from friends and neighbours. If, from the occasionally paying of attention to health matters at a younger age, people had come to know that after the age of forty, the percentage of saturation of oxygen in blood, in any case, drops by approximately two percent for every decade of life lived after forty, perhaps an eighty-year old uncle would know how to deal with a reading of ninety or eighty-eight percent oxygen saturation in blood, and think of it as being normal instead of getting very scared, all of a sudden, and entering into a state of panic. It is no secret that when one begins to think about one’s breathing, which is an involuntary activity, and one turns into something voluntary to which one pays too much attention, it is a miracle that one is able to breathe at all, for some time thereafter, especially if one is releasing stress chemicals into the blood constantly due to the worry that one might not be breathing too well. I am not saying that more people got scared by sudden knowledge and measurements than was necessary, but we must at least consider this as a possibility. If people had been exposed to some periods of ill health, or if they had suffered from some bronchitis, some bronchiectasis, some bronchial asthma, or some mild form of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, they could have all become more interested in the functioning of their body as an exquisitely-designed machine that can malfunction, instead of identifying with their bodies as themselves. They would naturally find out more about what the body is good for, and what it is not good for, and not overload it with things that have never been good for human bodies, which cause chronic inflammation, and blood clotting, and atherosclerosis.

Of course, there are always a handful of people with whom the opposite could also happen; people who are so happy about the good time that has passed that they are ready for whatever happens in the future. The point is that such people constitute only a handful, in any population. With the large majority, the reaction to late-life illness is in direct proportion with the lack of exposure to poor health during one’s youth and middle-age.

Thus, it may be argued that good health for the bulk of the early parts of one’s life only sets one up for a bigger fall when one’s health eventually fails, as it does with many people. One is then caught unprepared, and unable to accept, or adapt. All the physical yoga, and the calisthenics, and the aerobics, that are done with obsessive worrying about possible bad health actually only help to make one even more unprepared, and unaccepting, of poor health. One doesn’t become more accepting of poor health by staving-off poor health, and worrying oneself to death about it. One becomes more accepting of poor health by allowing oneself to experience poor health, as and when it comes, in bursts and spurts, towards an eventual goal of not becoming too attached to this body – which we already know will not remain forever, regardless of what we think will follow thereafter.

I will cite the example here of an (unrelated) uncle, and an aunty, that I knew.

The uncle did physical yoga his entire life, and had excellent health. However, on the rare occasions on which his bowels did not move at the expected time, in the early hours of the morning, he made the entire household (which included my acquaintance, his son) quite miserable, because he felt really miserable himself, and simply couldn’t accept the fact that someone like him could also occasionally develop constipation. In his seventies, he fell down one day (walking backwards, and tripping on something that he didn’t know was there) and broke his hip. The hip-replacement implant failed some years later, and he became bedridden, after a second implant too developed a problem and he became too old to undergo a third surgery. He never really managed to adjust to the new reality, right until his departure from this world. The aunty, his wife, developed diabetes in her early seventies. She became quite obsessed with her blood sugar values, measuring them three of four times every day, and worrying about them each time the fasting sugar readings went a few notches above the normal, or whenever the random sugar readings went above a certain value, all still very much within the error range of the measuring instrument, or the range of natural variation shown by the body on different days. The worrying eventually got to her mind, and to her brain, and then appeared to accelerate her mental degeneration.

The advantage of being exposed to something, or the other, every now and then, i.e., the advantage of something or the other happening to one’s health, every so often, is that the mind becomes used to the body’s illnesses and, therefore, much more difficult to rattle. One becomes used to the fact that the body is a machine. One becomes used to the fact that things will happen to the body. One becomes used to the fact that the body has various repair mechanisms of its own, and that no matter how serious something seems, every scope remains available for it to pass without causing one to pass away.

One comes to realize that one’s worry and obsession only interfere with the process of healing. Such experiences end up disconnecting one’s health from how happy and content one remains, with feedback-linked effects that end up improving natural regeneration, and restoring good health.

Then the body only remains a vehicle for one’s mind and consciousness, within one’s consciousness. Then the body is then no longer the master of one’s experience of this world, but rather a slave. Ideally, consciousness must guide the mind, to guide the body. In our current world, this river is mostly flowing in the opposite direction, with the body driving the mind, and with the mind driving consciousness, instead of the other way around.

I have learnt about all many of these things from personal experience, and about some of these things from a beloved preceptor and from his good friends whom I have had the good fortune of sharing a fond acquaintance. Lest you think that I am overstating the case here for intermittently good health, I would like to share some of my own experiences with readers in the remainder of this paragraph. The hope is that it will provide them with some encouragement, and also with some immunization from becoming rattled, should some small forms of ill health happen to befall them. Here is a shortlist of the things that this body of mine happens to have already gone through, between the ages of 33 and 55, after having enjoyed almost perfect health until the age of 33 with nary an illness or a day off, besides one episode of bronchitis, three episodes of diarrhoea, and maybe a total of five or six episodes of fever. The following are the things that have happened during the last twenty-two years: (1) clot-based brain stroke, with temporary partial paralysis, (2) surgery for direct and indirect inguinal hernia, (3) avascular necrosis of the neck of the femur, (4) laser surgery for retinal detachment, (5) detachment of the posterior vitreous from the retina in both eyes, (6) acute esophagitis, treated with duodenal sphincter-closing agents, (7) treatment for a duodenal ulcer, (8) microwave catheter-based ablation of heart tissue to treat a condition called preexcitation supraventricular tachycardia, (9) treatment with bradycardia-inducing agents to treat acute atrial fibrillation of the heart, (10) repeated epididymal and other cysts of bacterial origin, (11) lifelong epidermal staphylococcal eruptions upon the skin, sometimes leading to cellulities, (12) multiple lipomas here and there in the body, (13) several episodes of very painful haemorrhoids, (14) a bad knee, from being overweight during my twenties, (15) hypermobility of the body’s joints, leading to a suspected diagnosis of a connective tissue disorder, involving either a collagen or fibrillin mutation, and causing multiple disorders involving connective tissue, (16) high blood sugar since the age of 41, treated with three types of medication, (17) high blood pressure since the age of 35, treated with four kinds of medication, (18) high cholesterol since the age of 45, treated with one kind of medication, (19) unusual thyroid behaviour in the thirties, (20) a bend at the tail-end of spine, from a fall suffered in youth, which could require surgery in the future, following age- and diabetes-related loss of muscle mass around the area, according to an orthopaedic surgeon, and (21) a few other things that cause fewer or less intense difficulties, such as a finding of coronary artery disease with ten to twenty percent compromised perfusion through the inferior valve of the heart. There is even the possibility that I have omitted a few things above, to keep the list from being too long.

Almost nobody who knows me, however, knows about any of the above, unless they happen to be the doctors I have consulted, or the close acquaintances whom I may have counselled by saying “don’t worry; look at me; I’ve had all this; I’m still on my feet; I have taken these illnesses as a part of life; I’ve taken medical leave only for the hernia surgery, in 2021, and the microwave ablation for PSVT, in 2002; just go to the doctors, and the hospitals, and then go to work on the same day, if you can, and dive into your work, and this will keep you from dwelling upon what is going on; you will get through it too; just accept it, and do whatever needs to be done; let the illness do what it will, and then pass away; don’t resist it with your will, because that has a tendency of increasing the misery; remain cheerful, happy and content; there’s no point in dying before one is dead; one might as well live out the remaining hours/days/weeks/months well, doing what needs to be done”.

Most people who don’t know me very well assume that I enjoy perfect health. This is because none of it really shows, and because I have the good fortune of being able to maintain a smiling visage, and an amiable personality, and countenance. Except for the period when I briefly used a walking stick after hernia surgery, a few months ago (because the mesh the surgeon installed below my intestines caused pain that tended to make me double-up without a walking stick), I used a walking stick. It causes many people to be startled. I joked that it was to keep them from engaging me in this, or that, to allow me to return to health sooner.

I do indeed enjoy perfect health. In the mind. And in reality, I also eat sweets, fries, and salted things, despite all the chronic conditions; of course, I do these in moderation (and, of course, my spouse would disagree completely with my claim regarding the moderation; but that is just the good fun of this experience of being alive, and of having a spouse). I do eat the tablets that I am supposed to take every day, whenever I have to take them. Of late, I have also started having brisk walks, and am considering starting some yoga for health.

The main thing is that instead of health being the thing that is on my mind, it is the thing that remains the furthest from my mind, at all times, except during investigations, at which time my curiosity about what is happening to the body tends to overwhelm any possible worry about what might be happening; somewhat like a car owner engaged in helping a car mechanic to trouble-shoot the problem in his/her vehicle. Of course, this could have something to do with the fact that I am a researcher and a teacher, and that this life seems to be to be just a blip in the infinity of my existence. Or maybe, I happen to be a researcher and a teacher in this life, because I have been cast in this mould of curiosity, and excitability, about the design of this body.

The human body is a machine. It will run down. There is no need to imagine that it will run down rapidly just because you have an illness. The human body also has great capacity for regeneration. This regeneration can keep one in ‘more-or-less okay’ health for the eight or nine decades that many of us will spend on this planet, with the increase in overall life expectancy.

The important thing to do is to learn to deal with the mind. The mind, through the brain, regulates the body, through its endocrine systems, and energy-distribution systems, in many important ways. Over fifteen years ago, I once heard my preceptor telling someone in a meeting of volunteers (working for the publications department of the organization that he heads) to continue to work through periods of ill health, to distract the mind away from obsessing about the illness. This happened when a particular volunteer of an advanced age happened to complain, in a quavering voice, about having developed diabetes. The said volunteer was already in his seventies, and retired from active service, at the time. I heard my preceptor tell him that if he works through the period of adaptation of his body to the diabetes, there would be fewer problems at later points of time.

I loved the above advice, which I absorbed, and accepted, and also applied in proxy, partly because I had tasted some types of ill health already by that time, while still in my thirties. In the years thereafter, I have followed this advice every time something happens to me. This is why I feel that I have managed to remain healthy, happy, and content, despite everything that nature has thrown towards me.

I hope that if you have read this article up to this point, you may have found something of use in it, or at least something to reflect upon.

Do not obsess about ill health. Welcome it, and accept it, as an honoured guest, come to teach you the most important lessons of life: the transience of it all, and the fact that this body is a machine, and not the core of who you are. If you find that an illness is coming up in your life every now and then, from your thirties or forties on, think of yourself as being blessed, and not cursed. You are learning to take things in stride. Any other kind of behavior could suggest that you have become spoiled by providence. There is always a payment for that. Nothing in this existence is free. Everything is either a payment for something that went before, or something for which a payment is to be made, going forward. Get used to this fact. Do not obsess about health. You might find that everything goes well, even if it appears not to. After all, it is what happens within you that matters, rather than appearances, and what happens to your body.