Building Strength for the Future, from present adversity
Health and illness follows certain foundational laws of cause and effect. Falling from some height (like a tree) risks breaking a bone; smoking increases rates of cancer. Those are fairly straight forward links that are easy to understand. We could say, the horse is clearly pulling the cart.
But there are other situations where two results seem to come parallel to each other, like the “horse” is walking just in front of, or just behind the “cart.” But there are other situations where two results seem to come parallel to each other, like the “horse” is walking just in front of, or just behind the “cart.” For example, it has been demonstrated that having heart disease puts you at higher risk of depression, and that having depression puts you at higher risk of heart disease. Also, that depression puts you at higher risk of developing diabetes, and diabetes puts you at higher risk of depression. Hmmm—which is now the proverbial horse and which is now the cart?
Artificial Sweeteners and What They Do to Our Humanity: Living an Authentic Life, part 1
Are you living a life of deprivation? Might seem like a strange question, as most people today are living in a world of such tremendous material abundance that it has no real historical precedent. People have never lived such complicated lives with so much stuff. There are, of course, scary times and hard situations when people do not have enough to eat or do not have a safe place to live, and unfortunately there are many places in the world right now where people are experiencing just this kind of desperation and loss. If you think about their lives very much, it is overwhelming. And sadly (but perhaps not so shockingly), it is very possible for most of us to go about daily life without giving it too much thought or too much worry. It becomes something we are aware of as a factual aspect of the news—one additional piece of information. It all becomes kind of abstract. How does that happen, that we can be connected to so much of the world and disconnected from it at the same time? What has been lost? Doesn't our loss of that capacity for real connection speak to another kind of inner, moral deprivation?