Relearning Old Lessons

I like to think that I'm living during the peak of human civilization. We have ready access to plenty of good food, high quality water, literature, communication, technology, health care and face little threat of acute disease, predation, starvation and isolation. We've controlled our environment and our collective living conditions to create communities which preserve our continued well-being.

However, from time to time, it becomes necessary to look back on the lessons we've learned either individually or collectively, and consider how we achieved this state of being.

Recently I've had to revisit some work that I had done several years ago. This is an opportunity for me to augment and improve the conclusions derived from this work, but I've been stymied at the start of this re-visitation because I trusted someone else. Years ago, I learned an important lesson about how best to do what needed to be done, but in this effort, I deferred to someone with more experience than myself to assist me. For the last several days I've invested a ton of effort for no return because of this trust. I knew that my system worked, but the recommended changes to my protocol would conserve precious and costly reagents. So by embracing the recommendation of a more experienced individual, I figured I could be more efficient in my work. Unfortunately, the recommendations caused my efforts to be in vain resulting in depression, frustration, stress and ultimately more incurred cost. I knew what I needed to do but listened to someone else who, even though my best interest was in her heart, made a recommendation that resulted in failure.

A similar lesson can be learned when considering my experiences trying to find a diet and exercise regiment. When I was a child growing up in a Catholic household, we had fish on Friday throughout the year and attempted to fast on Fridays during Lent. From a dietary point of view, both fish intake and intermittent fasting are things I've come to embrace as part of my primal/ paleo lifestyle. Similar to Jewish Kosher Laws which were developed to prevent food-born disease, these Catholic traditions, if embraced fully, can improve health and longevity, but have fallen from consciousness as society has secularized. As we've embraced the land of plenty, society has grown obese and suffers from many more health problems than we did historically. Could this be because we've forgotten the lessons we've learned on how to live a healthy and productive life? Could we be better off if we embraced to lifestyles of our grandparents who were generally lean and healthy until late in life? Some lessons are only learned by listening to our bodies, paying attention and experimenting with what makes us ultimately happy. This makes me wonder, are there other lessons which should be embraced despite the prevailing opinions of society or experts?