On a thin wicket

The more you live life, the more you know you are on a extremely thin wicket. By this what I mean is, things you have seen and read and experienced all come together in your brain to make any sort of decision in your life. And our knowledge about anything is so tiny. I hear you say ‘Yeah..we know that’. Still I inch forward to put forth my views below.

For example, the food that you eat is heavily influenced by several factors. If you are born in a South Indian Brahmin family you are pretty much a vegetarian all your life. You have no clue what you are missing by not eating fish. Yes, from science (and Google — ‘benefits of eating fish’) we know that it is a source of Vitamin D, protien, Omega 3 fatty acids and so on. Now if you do not eat fish and do not drink soy milk (Google — ‘vitamin D rich foods’) or do not get adequate sun light which leaves your body to not absorb Vitamin D and so on…

But do you really care what the deficiency of Vitamin D in your body will do? Well, it (Google — vitamin D deficiency) tells that it can lead to soft bones to skeletal deformities to cardio vascular disease to cancer.

I guess you are getting the point across by now.

We have a huge amount of things going on in our body and the complex mind. And trying to know even a small thing like Vitamin D can lead you to all sort of places you have never been before and exactly bring you back in terms of your intelligence or sometimes even degrade your decision making (remember more knowledge is dangerous, well …, sometimes..)

Now you can back track and ask all sort of questions as to why would eating fish be a bad thing to why am I staying indoors and do this social networking or why am I not having that Soy milk?

Questioning does not help much. You still continue with your life with the habits you have been inculcated with or you have acquired over time.

So does it mean knowing all this information about that little thing called Vitamin D is a waste?

If you ask a Doctor or your friends who are medically trying to come up to speed reading all sort of things :-) , they will adequately warn you that you are making a mistake and you need a change in your life style. You need to walk more outside. It’s OK if you have aversion to eating non-vegetarian…But at least be out in the open in the mornings or evenings and get some milk going in your diet.

But if you ask me, I would say ‘Forget it’.

You know why? It is obvious from the above that, if a little thing like ‘Vitamin D’ can cause so much impact to your body, and that too the information is so incomplete, still evolving and updating, and massively unconnected with other pieces of information (read a Vitamin A or a colo-rectal cancer , if such a thing exists :-) then what the heck ?

By now it is clear that we are horribly deficient on knowing ‘Who we are’ (not the philosophical stance I took in other articles) but instead the knowledge about our own physical body. The more you search and learn the more it is obvious that we know ( I mean not just you and me, but humans themselves) very little and what little we know are just pointed nuggets of information completely disconnected in our overall understanding of health. (Again I digress to think that had Larry Page and Sergey Brin not made Google we would still be thinking we know everything. But now that we have most of the information what we know out there in front of us, it becomes clearer that we have a long long way to go on any small thing and we will still be unfinished like the way the word Infinitesimal comes to mean what it means. Well I may be missing on that 48 million 52 thousandth search result which may have all the answers to my problems, but I need to wait for that to bubble up in eternity)

It looks like a “Huge, Huge Work in progress’ to me. This whole science and knowledge and all that stuff and it ain’t gonna get over any time soon baby! But there is no other way out there as an alternate as well to pin your hopes on.

OK, now that I have frightened you adequately (or enlightened you in some other ways), it turns out to be ‘What can we do from here?” type of thinking.

I guess I would say this. Which had been said a million times in a million possible ways by elders and people who have lived on this planet before you (well could be you as well :-) and I repeat for the sake of ending this article on a happy note.

1. Just enjoy what you do.
2. Repeat 1
3. Repeat 2