When Knowledge Is Not Enough

We live in a world of knowledge saturation. We have far more information than we can ever process into useful relevance.

On the other hand, we often have awareness that could help us in dilemmas or extricate us from difficult situations – but we don’t act on it.

It is said that a form of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Yikes. How often I find myself resembling that!

I am, however, making attempts to effect changes in some lifestyle habits. Us retired folks tend to become less active (while at the same time not pushing back from the table soon enough), and it's easy to find ourselves entrenched in old habits.

Some years ago I was told by my doc that I have “adult onset (Type II) diabetes”. It was a shock. Obviously, whatever I had been doing up to that point wasn’t working. I began to investigate the wealth of information available on the internet. And I found a treasure of interesting things along with some wonderful suggestions.

Just by exercising regularly, for instance, I discovered that I could put a clamp on the progression of the disease. I now have a regular exercise routine, as personally distasteful as I find doing exercise just for the sake of exercise. I'd much rather play racquetball and get the exercise by playing a sport.

I learned that certain natural herbs, minerals and vitamins could also claw at the disease. I now take several each day, including vitamins B & D, gymnema sylvestre, selenium, vanadium, and cinnamon (NOT via a danish).

And I learned that it’s carbohydrates, more than anything else, that cause the blood sugar spikes that relate to Type II diabetes. I have drastically limited carbs in my diet, especially the bad ones (yep, there are good ones and bad ones).

What happened? My blood tests last month were the best they’ve been in five years. Wow. Changing my behavior brought a different result. The late, and relatively unknown, psychologist, Abraham Maslow, has this sage observation: "I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act."

To me, that’s sound wisdom. If now I would just apply it in more areas of my life.