Flying Solo

Oops, there goes Icarus.....

With all due respect and sincere sympathy for those who have no choice, I am sick of using crutches. I think I'll try flying solo just to see if I can, or if I'll go crashing into the sea like Icarus when he flew too close to the sun, melting his wax wings. Of course all that was just so much Greek mythology, and I'm not really planning to attempt flight. But it would be nice to think I can actually live my life without dependency on doctors or medications or healers of any sort, and instead use the power of my own mind and faith in my positive choices to deliver my salvation.

What's got me thinking this way is the sudden and difficult decision to discontinue my weekly acupuncture treatments. After all, I've been going for eight months and while certain aspects of my health have greatly improved, my underlying hope is that the reason I feel better is because  healthy behaviors like eating well, exercising frequently,  practicing meditation and repetition of a mantra have worked their magic, which is really not magic at all.

Like most people who fear going it alone, which is all of us, in the past I have used many other crutches, most notably Berger's cookies (http://www.bergercookies.com/) and smoking marijuana, sometimes at the same time. Those stopped working for me long ago, and in fact may have caused that buildup of negative "qi" those acupuncture treatments released. (Sounds nutty, I know, but not any nuttier than Donald Trump leading in the polls or Hillary Clinton being on the cusp of the presidency.) We all know people whose crutches, be it alcohol, common drugstore sleep aids and painkillers, and even plain old caffeine, have caused impairments worse than whatever they got the crutches for in the first place.

As for Icarus -- his father warned him but he did it anyway, allegedly out of hubris. I had to look that word up and learned that it "indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence,
accomplishments or capabilities, especially when the person exhibiting it is in a position of power." Clearly that's not my problem.