Medicated health

   We’ve got our minds on medicines and treatments, but have no idea where health comes from. We need interventions, sure, but health and growth come from within. You can’t create them with policy or funding or initiatives. That’s not where the life of humanity lives. And there are inherent costs to choices we’ve made as a society and the freedoms we’ve embraced and responsibilities and capacities we’ve abdicated, and we pay them by picking up the tab in doctor’s bills for the scrapes and bruises we aquire as a result. You can’t expect people to advance when they’re forever undergoing treatment.

    Our systems pay the price of establishing a semblance of order and mitigating consequences that we can’t or won’t establish order in our own lives. And ultimately that’s all those systems can do. They can compensate, like a crutch. They can blunt and soothe like a painkiller. They can cover up, like a bandage. But they can’t heal us. That comes from within.

   And if healing doesn’t come from within, and even worse if we mistake our treatments for the source of of our health, if we become dependent on them to keep us together, then we will never be free of them and they will never work the way we think they should, and we will keep casting about for more and more (and more extreme) treatments and interventions. Until we kill the patient.