Love your brain.
But remember your body is your true Best Friend
In the extreme hot summer of 1978, I was teaching English as a Foreign Language at a school in South Kensington, minutes walk from where I was living with my invalid Dad.
I developed a piercing headache. It quickly got worse, so I could not ignore it, and soon it was with me day and night. It began to interfere with my teaching. I went to the doctor. He prescribed one pain killer after another. No change.
I went to the Middlesex Hospital in the West End, where I had an injection. Then I was left in a room alone with my scintillating thoughts for 45 minutes, sitting bent double on an old wooden stool with my head wedged under a scintillator detector.
They showed me the black and white picture of my veins and capillary networks inside my skull.
Illuminated by alpha particles, my brain looked like a milky galaxy of millions of pinpoints.
They said there was no sign of a tumour.
I continued my classroom teaching. At times the words I wrote on the whiteboard in my classroom at the School of English would swim about in a comical way, while behind me my students sat in wavy hazy rows, totally unaware they were participating in a real-time Red Dwarf Sci-Fi extravaganza.
Finally, my doc prescribed a period pain pill called Ponstan. I have good cause to remember it. It was bicoloured, yellow and pink. The piercing persistent headache promptly disappeared, never to return.
This blessed relief coincided with my declared decision, after about seven years of TEFL, to give up teaching and to look for a plain and simple nine-to-five desk job.
My brain had reached the very end of its tether with the adrenaline filled stage fright I experienced at the start of every single one hour lesson, up six times a day, for years and years.
I loved the work. In class, as well as off duty, I was surrounded by young people, who were well motivated, often paying their own way to come to London for their tuition. Some became firm friends for years.
Most of my colleagues seemed able to sail into a class, reach for a memorised lesson from a mental library bookshelf, deliver such and such a lesson six times a day, and go home.
I prepared notes and sketches for every lesson. It was always the same. Arriving at the school, I’d wade through a corridor of lava spiked with hot adrenaline, before opening the door and entering the next classroom full of familiar friendly faces.
It was my body that suddenly took charge. My body had to take over the role of protector, because I had been stubbornly instructing my brain to overlook and ignore the toxic harm the adrenaline was doing to me.
Your brain is your champion. It is your guide and brave companion. Love your brain.
But remember your body is like a true best friend, full of the most ancient wisdom.
Your body knows everything about you!
You can always turn to your body and rely on it completely for advice any time, anywhere.
Get intimate with your body. Get into the habit of having chats, holding conversations. Make time for the occasional candle-lit tête à tête.
Who loves you? Who has your welfare permanently as the top and only priority? And who knows you better than you know yourself?
Do what you would do before crossing the road – stop and listen to what your body has to say. It wants you to stay alive. It wants you to be well. It – in a most mysterious way – adores you!
Like that man Kojac said,
“Who loves you, baby?”
The View at 72+ 