Today’s my birthday and I am turning 46. I quickly searched Continuations (via gawk.it) and it appears that I last blogged about my birthday three years ago. I am happy to report that not much has changed. Despite a fairly frenetic work pace over the intervening time with a lot of travel (and correspondingly less hair) I am lucky to be healthy and feeling full of energy.
There is the occasional reminder though that my body is no longer thirty. And that got me thinking about something somewhat surprising. We seem to learn awfully little in school about how to take care of our own bodies Admittedly it’s a long time ago that I was in school and it was in Germany. I do recall learning how a muscle works but nothing about which muscles to stretch. Similarly all about how food is absorbed but very little about what that means for diet. Ditto for sleep, the brain, etc.
Given that our body is an amazingly complex machine, it would seem that much more of school should be taken up with becoming a competent owner and operator of that machine. Maybe O'Reilly should publish: Your Body, the Missing Manual (although the subtitle of that series won’t be entirely applicable: “the book that should have been in the box” – at least not yet).
PS For friends and family - no presents please - here is my Donor’s Choose giving page
