We live in a sea of words. Once learned, they come to us automatically as we express what we want or know or as we listen to others doing the same.
As important as many of those words are, one is at the root of our personal well-being, maybe even our survival. That word is “protect.” It is so important that it should be foremost in our thoughts every time and all the time.
For example, suppose you are in an area that has been been targeted as likely to be affected by a hurricane, flood, or forest fire. The personnel who determined and announced that danger have fulfilled their responsibility. At that point you can either follow up with efforts to protect yourself or you can ignore the announcement with the old and shopworn phrase, “it can’t happen to me.”
Hardly a day goes by but what we encounter advisories of some kind, usually expressed as precautions to take or danger to avoid. It can range from the advisories we get when we buy medicine to the instruction manuals that come with pieces of equipment we buy. There are so many instructions that we tend to ignore what they say, much less understand how they specifically apply to us.
In doing that, however, we expose ourselves to one or more conditions ranging from mere discomfort to serious injury, even death. For example, every year thousands of people are killed in highway crashes. What we don’t hear about nearly enough are the hundreds of thousands who are injured — people whose lives are suddenly and permanently changed. For them, even the smallest of what once were simple tasks became huge challenges.
To demonstrate, lay down the cellphone or back away from the keyboard and stretch out both arms directly in front of you, flatten both hands and extend all your fingers vertically as if you were pushing against a wall.
Now you can plainly see all five fingers on each hand — the thumb which we use as a counterforce to the rest of the hand, followed by the forefinger that takes the lead in that counterforce, the middle finger (I’ll let you decide what it is best used for), then the ring finger followed by the little or “pinky” finger.
Imagine the challenges you would face if you lost a thumb or any one or two of the remaining fingers. For openers, to work a keyboard you would be forced to use the much slower “hunt and peck” method. The loss of even more fingers would greatly magnify that problem. Voice recognition methodology might help but would be only a partial answer because of words that sound the same but have entirely different meanings.
Lose the ring finger and the little finger, and you won’t be able to grasp anything with enough firmness to tighten or loosen the lid or top on a jar or bottle. Tying your shoes or buttoning your shirt would require several slow and deliberate moves.
Those realities lead to this question: How many times during an ordinary week do you risk serious injury to or loss of one or more fingers? For you to admit even a single risk is one too many because it means you have either forgotten or ignored what is necessary to protect those parts of your anatomy.
If that doesn’t seem to be that much of a threat, consider that every time you drive somewhere, just one bad act by another driver can cause a crash resulting in serious injuries. That alone could drastically change the way you work and play or even prevent you from doing one or the other ever again.
The purpose here isn’t to make you paranoid or afraid, but to emphasize the reality that just as we can inflict damage upon ourselves, so can we inflict it upon others.
Those legally responsible for your welfare flag your attention to those cautions and remind you of the dangers. Then, it is squarely up to you to read and enforce those instructions.
Follow that kind of logic and you will be taking a huge step in the direction of having a good life.
