[Image by RubyShoes]

Are you responsible for your own demise?

According to a recent article in Wired cheekily called, "Cheat Death," you are. In the article, Ralph Keeney, a decision analyst at Duke, reports "55 percent of deaths for people age 15 to 64 can be attributed to decisions with readily available alternatives. In other words, most people are the agents of their own demise."

Yesterday during a conversation with the always inspiring Jen Lee (pictured with me in the photograph above) I told her about a hamster that recently died. 

The hamster was getting older. It had a growth in its leg that had to be removed. Once it was removed the hamster had less sensation in its leg. So the hamster, because it had no feeling in its leg, gnawed it off. The hamster probably could have lived a little longer with a numb limb. But having an open wound, it didn't. 

There's a very old story about the work monks do. Their purpose isn't to be holy and wear robes. Although I'm sure being holy and wearing robes is part of the job description. Their job is to "dress the nine wounds of the body." Rather than seeing the body as essentially perfect, they see it as having nine open wounds (top to bottom: your eyes, ears, nose, mouth and genitals make up the nine). 

Beyond the physical body, we all have numb areas in our life that we may not be attending. 

A friend has a project he's been giving himself to for nearly a decade. He has bottomed out with it. He's given the project another month and then he's going to end it - chop it off from his life. 

He wrote about it, sharing his vulnerability. And got some sobering advice in the comments from Cameron Burgess:

"Do you really think people would notice if you took two days off to work on your business and only made 5 posts each day instead of ten? Do you really need to go to a yoga conference and blog about it? What happens if it's the last trip, the last conference you cover? 

Clearly you need to do something different - because what you're doing isn't working."

Short answer: attend to your wounds before attempting to care for others. And do it now.

If we are responsible for our own demise, we're also responsible for our own health and well-being. The way to do that is to start with the question: what areas have gone numb? What areas your life need tending to?

Which wounds do you need to dress? 

[Side note, it might be extreme but getting down to 100 things is a place to start.]