A few days ago, an Israeli doctor wrote that after more than 20 years of practicing medicine, he finds himself too many times having to say he doesn’t know. He says Covid has upended everything in his profession, and he and many of his colleagues find themselves clueless all too often.
It seems as though reality is catching up with us in every aspect of our lives. Everything we’ve put on a pedestal is crumbling, including, if not first and foremost, modern medicine. We’ve turned being healthy into a business, and in business, money matters, and not people.
Worse yet, in the past year, the struggle against Covid-19 has become a political power struggle, and decisions that cost lives and livelihoods of millions cater to party interests rather than to the interest of the people. As with everything else, Covid has exposed our nature, and it is not pretty.
We have forgotten that in the end, the human body is that of an animal. Just as animals get their healing from nature, so could we, if we only stayed attentive to our nature. Instead of an attitude of cutting open, replacing, and stitching back, we could have known how to maintain our health and how to heal ourselves easily and quickly when we need it. But being healthy isn’t lucrative, so we are taught to stop listening to ourselves and we become ill.
I am not advocating veganism; I am simply pointing out that we have become deaf to the natural needs of our body, which, by the way, are very few and cost almost nothing. If we were more attentive, we would know what plants are good for what problem, and how to keep ourselves more generally healthy.
We are living within nature; nature has engendered us, sustains us, yet when it comes to our health, we have no clue how to use it to maintain or regain our health. It is as if we’ve cut off the umbilical cord that nourished us, and now we’re trying to survive disconnected from our nurturing mother.
Sadly, where our disconnection is most apparent is with each other. We have not only disconnected from nature; we have, first and foremost, disconnected from each other. We are suffering from moral narcissism—thinking about how our actions make us feel about ourselves rather about their consequences for others. Just as we treat every organ in our body as though it is a standalone system, we treat ourselves as standalone individuals, regardless of the society we live in. The same approach that sickens our society sickens our bodies; we are ill from within and from without.
So reconnecting to nature means reconnecting to every thing and every one, feeling that we are all parts of one system, which tends to all its parts, including us. But it does so only if we, too, tend to it. If we want to become healthy, we must heal our social attitude. This will heal our society, which, in turn, will heal our bodies, and the world will be a healthy, happy place to live in.