An Antidote to THIS Life-Limiting Allergy
Posted on Jul 15, 2016 5:14pm PDT
When it comes to what the medical community knows about allergies today,
we’ve made incredible progress in the last few decades – and
society has jumped on board to help. From the news media adding a pollen
index rating to weather reports for seasonal allergy sufferers, to many
schools now instituting “nut-free” policies in an effort to
help prevent youngsters with nut allergies from accidentally coming into
contact with allergens that can cause life-threatening symptoms, we believe
what the science tells us and we act out of the best interests of our
fellow human, whether we suffer from their particular allergy or not.
However, I pose these question to you: What if the allergy I’m talking
about has nothing directly to do with a clinical diagnosis, but can still
put crushing limitations on a person’s life? What should we know
about it? How can we prevent it – in ourselves and the people we
care about?
As a society today, we’ve become highly allergic to uncertainty.
Perhaps it is the fear caused by the tragedies we are incessantly exposed
to via 24-hour news media cycles, or recoil from the bashing, shaming
and condemnation of ideas that are “other” on social media,
something is happening to our collective psyche that I fear will ultimately
result in suffocating limitations on our ability to lead successful lives
in the coming decades.
If we know no other Truths (with a capital T) about life, we know this:
None of us knows when our time is up. Most people grasp this concept intellectually,
but we often rail against it emotionally. We “helicopter”
over our children in the hopes we can protect them from the ‘Boogey
Man,’ the Bully, the Disappointments that life brings. We stifle
our creativity, our ideas, and our innovation for fear of ridicule or
disapproval from others, even people we’ve never met before and
never will.
We don’t know what tomorrow (or ten minutes from now) will bring,
so we draw in and we close off. But I am here to tell you as the greatest
and most sophisticated species on the planet, this isn’t what we
were ancestrally wired to do. We are scientifically designed to take calculated
risks and to
succeed based on an intrinsic network of DNA that helps us expertly navigate the
hurdles we may be required to jump in doing so. We weren’t designed
to cower and we certainly weren’t made to go it alone.
Humans are “pack animals” in a sense. We are wired for togetherness
to help each other survive and thrive, no matter what life brings. Remember
that the next time you find yourself “itchy” over the uncertainty
of life. Don’t ignore the itch, but please don’t let it suffocate
your Victorious Spirit or that of the people around you. You are already
designed to avoid imminent danger with the fight-or-flight response that
is unique to human beings. Start working today on discerning the difference
between an imminent need to flee and the uncertainty that simply comes
with living the best life possible for you. The most successful people
throughout the history of the world were rarely “certain”
of what their ideas or actions might bring. They simply found a way to
power through.