Getting Past Symptoms

While I am amazed by and grateful for the advances in modern medicine – after all, I have at least one child who wouldn’t be alive today without those amazing new technologies – I still sometimes feel as though the medical community can easily get caught up in a common trap: treating symptoms and not root problems. Although life expectancies continue to rise, are people really living longer or just dying slower? Medications and treatments can dramatically extend a patient’s life without curing underlying issues. Years are added to life, but life may be absent from those years.

This also extends far beyond medicine. Even for those who are perfectly healthy physically, I believe many are suffering in other ways, settling for an existence not up to par with the life they should be living. Because of the busyness and hectic schedules we all maintain – not to mention the constant barrage of entertainment and distraction – we effectively numb the symptoms of an under-lived life while leaving the root causes untreated. The result is many years full of activity, but often devoid of living. It’s like injecting psychological morphine: the senses are deadened and the pain goes away for the moment, but the soul continues to erode away.

Make decisions to add life to your years, not just years to your life.

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Mindset Matters

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