I’ve never really spoken about spinal decay and degeneration. The neurodynamics of how a person changes over a matter of weeks or months is always what fascinated me most and people can rarely hold their attention for 10 years anyway. But going to the dentist a few weeks ago and having the ugly bits pointed out to me and subsequently dealt to by an angle grinder, made the stuff about rotting spines I learnt in school take a few steps closer to the fore of my mind, and I dug out an example from the practice of such change over a relatively short period of time – 10 years.
The model of decay always made me feel like a used car salesman: “If you don’t do this for the next 10 years, you’ll die.”
Well, no, you probably won’t die, but you may lead an average life. However, a lot of people in this world lead seemingly average lives already and appear blissfully happy, much to my chagrin. Or perhaps that’s simply the monocular viewpoint of an anxiously neurotic mind looking through the lens of a constant need for over-achievement I’ve always had. Who knows, really. I’ve always over-thought the idea of happiness anyway, led it to water and beaten it repeatedly until it took a few sips so it didn’t die of dehydration, kindly enabling me to make it thus far in life.
On the inside I’m all rainbows and unicorns though, promise.
Average is something I’m never comfortable in settling for and thus attempt to practise in the way that I understand chiropractic. Plasticity: how the brain changes itself. How our environment changes it (the adjustment) and how we change it ourselves (thought). The two key elements which keep driving me to do what I do at this stage in my life, and take pleasure in recording the changes in people. However it’s a steep and narrow path. Sometimes neurodynamics, or unlearning old habits, takes time, effort, practice and a certain abstraction of thought. And occasionally for a thirsty horse, average actually turns out to be okay due to the workload. Albethat disappointing sometimes, everybody walks their own path and creates their own abstractions of reality and what it means to be healthy.
Decay will inevitably happen over a period of time though. The question of looking after your spine is whether you do so in a timely manner or not, because unfortunately the spine is not as inanimate as enamelled teeth. Each joint is alive with thousands of neurons sending feedback into the brain, creating or uncreating one’s view of the world. Too much sway one way leads to the path of the thirsty horse: unhappy and unaware.
C’est la vie.
The yellow brick road is as tortuous and vastly different for you as it is for me in the search for our own little piece of godly mecca in this lifetime. But seriously, if you don’t do this, you’ll die. Slowly. Because time is like a drug; too much of it will kill you.