russmac / Pixabay – Blog Amateur or Pro?

Amateurs do things till they get it right. Professionals do it until they can’t get it wrong. We are in control of our health. We make daily choices regarding food, exercise, stress management, etc. Do we occasionally make good decisions? Or, do we consistently never make a bad decision?

I can speak for most of us. We want good health and generally do the things required. But, many times we don’t know if what we are doing is correct. We are told things by various authorities and find out years later that what we thought we were doing was wrong.

I was a Naval Flight Officer in an earlier life. I flew in P-3 Orion aircraft. We had to know many things. We had to know our seat position responsibilities and equipment. We were tested periodically to ensure we were competent.

However, knowing one position is not enough. I was the Mission Commander and Tactical Coordinator on an antisubmarine warfare aircraft. Our missions were typically twelve hours. We would preflight for three hours and post-flight similarly. Our flight days were a minimum of eighteen hours.

My crew and I sat in the back of the aircraft. Everything aft of the flight station (where the pilots and flight engineers sat) is considered the rear of the aircraft. It was crammed full of electronic bays. Each bay had many types of equipment. If a fire occurred, you had to know each piece of electronics and the circuit breaker to be pulled to shut down that box.

We had to know our enemy well also. Before traveling in certain parts of the world, we had to take written tests on combat capability, silhouette recognition, electronic countermeasures and a whole host of other parameters of the enemy subsurface, surface, and air threats.

What if we applied that same rationale to our health. Do we really know our bodies? Do we really know how everything works in conjunction with each other? Do we really know the threats we encounter daily? There are so many things that we should know but don’t. We don’t know what we don’t know because we are not trained properly.

If you don’t have the initiative to find out for yourself and act, you could be subject to a fate worse than death. My father used to think that death was the worst-case scenario. I would tell him that having someone change his diaper for years was worse. It’s all relative to what you want your quality of life to be in the future.

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