I took the photo above when a family of three deer ran by our campus house. The fawn's spots give it away as a baby even to the untrained eye.
Okay, you caught me; the photo really doesn't have anything to do with the topic of my post except that I've been thinking about babies' faces, and I wanted to post a baby photo. I went with a deer one rather than a dear one.
Have you ever seen a tiny baby smile, and you know that the expression has nothing to do with external stimuli, that the face is most likely reflecting something going on in the baby's digestive tract? I was thinking about how often that's true with grown adults, too. I've sometimes found myself in the middle of a conversation, with no idea what the other person is saying because my back hurts or I'm hungry or anything else is going on inside my body that has absolutely nothing to do with what we're talking about.
You've all heard the warning not to compare your insides to other people's outsides, right? But I guess I'm thinking about how important it is to remember that pain or even discomfort can reduce all of us to no more than our bodies' needs. Just like the infants who cry when they're hungry or tired or gassy, most adults too lack the ability to overcome our physical selves.
Maybe we could all benefit from the training of the stoic masters who can overcome pain, but maybe not. By learning to ignore the pains, wouldn't we also lose the pleasures? Wouldn't we all be better off in acknowledging the needs of our bodies, taking care of our corporeal forms, and then moving along to contemplating bigger things?
Please share your responses in the comments.
Good issue, value in attending to one’s internal, physical status. But a lot of the time, one’s insides just chug along, without pain or discomfort. Much more often diverse feelings and emotions whip through us, and many folk are not so good at recognizing that something is happening, much less having fluid identification to name it/them.
That’s true. We need to learn to read our bodies and minds!
I think you are right. There are so many demands we face every day that it’s easy to brush aside hunger, thirst, fatigue. When faced with many demands, I’ve been reminding myself, “My body comes first.” In the long run, it’s nearly always true.
A good lesson — because if you don’t put your body first, you can’t do any of the other things anyway!