When I introduced the Misfires series I emphasized our biology and our emotional health. Biological pathology and human experience are not identical. 

Healing requires attention to both. 

Perhaps our journey now takes an unexpected turn: understanding emotion through biology.

Today I want to talk with you about health. Specifically, I  will focus on your emotions as you focus on your health.

While we focus on emotion, will you trust me enough to take a momentary journey towards “awe”? You may ask, “Mary, where are you taking me?” “What does awe and wonder have to do with biological misfires?” What does wonder and amazement have to do with my emotions and my health?

Please think along with me for a brief second. In my opinion, before we can understand a biological misfire, we must first understand the miracle of your biology. Disease is memorable because health is so abundant.

A misfire matters only because your biological success is so overwhelmingly common. We spend enormous energy thinking about disease, yet we rarely notice the trillions of successful biological events occurring every second that make life possible.

Biology works. 

Quietly ….

Shhhhhhh.  

Listen

It is working for you even now.

Health Surrounds You All The Time

Health is the quiet success of life occurring within us every moment.

A miracle…..

When you are diagnosed with a disease (a term I don’t particularly like), your emotions typically race towards shock and fear. I’m unsure how fear emerges with the diagnosis, but it typically does. I have a sense that our fear is linked to our probably impending concern that we might die.

Within this essay, one of my goals is to encourage you to move away from your “fear reaction” to  a response that is more hopeful, maybe even joyful, towards a reaction that is one of wonder.  

Wonder

Gratitude

Perspective

Hope

Less fear

Consider if you move very slowly, and mindfully toward a feeling of gratitude, hope, and eventually less fear, when possible. May your emotions immediately trigger a mindset that encompasses a focus on health and positivity regarding all of the various developments in science that have emerged in recent years. 

I want to argue that if you receive a diagnosis of a disease or an illness from  your doctor, your response will be less emotional if you move your mind away from the immediate trigger of the fear response.

How Do I Change My Fear Response?

How may I change my initial emotional reaction to the diagnosis you ask?  Well, that is the basic thesis within this blog. 

I want to help you change your emotions when you receive your diagnosis. My recommendations are derived from my own 10 or so years of living with cancer, and from numerous ongoing conversations with patients whom I have met over the years. 

As a researcher at heart, I ask many questions to everyone around me, and I analyze their replies. What follows are my conclusions regarding the miracles which are all around us.

I am not writing a cancer series.

This is not a biology series.

It is not  even a philosophy series.

I want to take you along with me on a guided emotional journey.

Focus on Systems, Processes, Natural, Nature-Made, Man Built/Designed

When I began to reflect upon the words and those semantics and metaphors, I focused on the word “AWE”. What is awe to me?

I had no idea my body was accomplishing all of this without my awareness. I purposefully began to focus on what was around me and within me. I thought about the single word AWE.

I first thought of awe as moving in three circles (TC). The first circle is Everyday Awe: The world is extraordinary.

A newborn baby moving their tiny fingers around my own.

An ocean wave arriving where physics predicts.

A hummingbird sampling my flowers.

The second circle is Biological Awe: The miracle is not only out there. It is also within me.

Millions of your immune cells quietly protected you while you admired the sunset.

While you were sleeping, damaged DNA was repaired, proteins were assembled, old cells were recycled, and new ones quietly took their place.

Sometimes I sit quietly and think about the extraordinary systems that surround us.

I think about an orchestra. Dozens of musicians reading different notes, entering at different moments, yet creating one piece of music.

I think about a forest. Thousands of living organisms—trees, birds, insects, fungi, streams—existing together in delicate balance.

I think about the space shuttle. Millions of individual parts designed to work together with astonishing precision.

Each fills me with awe.

Then I remember something even more extraordinary.

Every one of those systems exists outside of me.

The most remarkable system I know is the one quietly working within me.

My body.

Without asking for applause.

Without asking to be noticed.

It simply continues.

This realization takes me to the third circle.

The third circle is Philosophical awe. This captures our beautiful destination.

Rather than to think of health as the absence of disease, perhaps to begin to think about health is something much richer. Maybe health is the ongoing symphony of countless successful events within our bodies that occur so faithfully that they rarely ask for our attention.

My own body is one of the most astonishing living systems I have ever encountered. My body is  among nature’s most extraordinary creations. My body is a miracle. The biology within my body is a miracle. 

I should take the time to celebrate this fact more often, and not be dismayed when rarely I find an intermittent biological misfire. So I did. I changed my thinking.

How Do I Move From Fear to Joy?

My own reality is that I have learned to find joy, comfort, and gratitude in the science and medicine that might find those occasional misfires and immediately begin to correct such.  When my own biology does not have necessary repair systems available at my time of need, my doctors, pathologists, nurses, and other scientists and researchers are ready and able to help me. This will be our focus in Part Three.

My 10 year journey leaves me in awe of my biology. I have become mesmerized by the medical sciences that rebuild me, when necessary.  Just as nature creates the beauty of snowflakes, ocean waves, trees and forests; and people create symphonies, space shuttles, and freeways; science has evolved to assist in my healing, to locate, understand, and repair my misfires. 

Medicine is not fighting the body.

Medicine is helping the body.

Modern medicine is not an enemy of nature. It is one of humanity’s greatest expressions of nature’s own desire to heal.

Why should my emotions rush towards fear? How did I modify my immediate reaction from sadness to awe? How might you reduce your own feelings of fear, blame, and despair when paired with a negative medical diagnosis? Read and re-read the examples on the remarkable human body.

I invite you to challenge my assumption that this is possible.  My friends and I discuss  the “fear” that accompanies  the diagnosis. How does it emerge? What causes this emotion to appear and nearly dominate a patient’s ability to listen and think immediately.  Where does all this fear come from? One bit of information from my own background that my be relevant here is that I have studied various cultural differences in how people view health, and make decisions. Perhaps each of our own lived experiences contribute to our reactions as tragedies emerge in life? Remember yourself as a little child. What happened when you felt sick? How did the adults around you react?

Part Two is really about your attention. I am asking you to pay attention to something you probably ignored all your life. I am asking you to:

Learn to Notice!

Every moment you have spent reading these pages, your body has quietly continued its work.

Cells have communicated.

Proteins have folded.

DNA has been repaired.

Your immune system has stood watch.

Your heart has continued its faithful rhythm.

Life has gone on inside you without asking for recognition.

Perhaps that is the greatest miracle of all.

So… Before Our Next Conversation

Keep Looking!

There is more health…

More wonder…

More hope…

 Than you first imagined. 

In gratitude, and hoping for your peace of mind.

#gratitudeultra

Note: In our next conversation, we’ll meet one of biology’s quiet heroes—the body’s remarkable repair systems. Every day they search for problems, repair damage, and protect us in ways we rarely notice. Understanding this “repair crew” helps explain why most biological misfires never become disease.