Stress and the Unpredictability of Life

 

     Life is truly unpredictable.

     You can be a doctor, rich and popular, who does nothing but advise people on how to live longer and live a healthy life, on how to avoid illnesses including cancers, on what to eat and what not to eat, on what to do and what not to do your body to stay healthy, and on why it is very important to avoid stress, as stress will make you sick and even kill you.

    Stress will make your mind and body feeble, you can't stress it enough, so you regularly spew out ways to avoid stress.

    People are saying that you'd probably live up to 150.

     Then, tragically, suddenly, you are diagnosed with a rare and deadly disease (so deadly one would be so lucky to survive a year after diagnosis). And the reason you developed the illness? Stress. You claim that you've been dealing with stress most of your life. How you were unable to avoid stress is what beats a lot of people.

     Then there’s this man in your neighborhood, who’s already in his seventies and who has been an alcoholic for many years and has been eating unhealthy food and who looks older than his age because, according to him, he’s been living a stressful life—but he’s still alive, illness-free and quite healthy.

    Methinks he should be the one preaching about how to live longer and stay healthy.

    You can subsist on a healthy diet all your life and suffer a heart attack in your forties, and then, you can eat nothing but crispy pata, sisig, lechon, chicharon bulaklak and the like, and die from a hit-and-run when you’re 104.

     You can be clean and neat and bacteria-free and careful all your life and die young, and then, you can jump from an airplane every day, sometimes without a parachute, and live until you’re 99.