The Common Cold Explained?

Has it ever been?

We get sniffles

We cough

We sneeze

We wheeze

We wipe a nose that can’t stop dripping

“WE   CAN   SEND   A   MAN   TO   THE   MOON   BUT   WE   CAN’T   CURE   THE   COMMON   COLD”

.         .         .and then there’s the Winter Cold.

There’s studies on this stuff, you know?

Dr. Mike Tipton, a Professor of Human Physiology at Portsmouth University in the UK studies the human body’s response to extreme environments–like being dunked in icy water or like what so many did on New Year’s Day when many took the Polar Bear Plunge in Lake Erie and I’m sure, other parts of the World.

Dr. Mike says the temperature of how your hands and feet dominate your overall sensation of thermal comfort. “You can be warm, but if your hands and feet are cold, you will feel cold,” Tipton states.

Hardly earth shattering information, huh? I mean go to a football game in sub-degree freezing temperatures WITHOUT GLOVES  and in thin socks and thin shoes.     .     .you won’t make it till kick-off.

But maybe the worst,

the absolute worst kind of   C  O  L  D  S

we can ever feel is not the ones we sneeze or shiver our ways through, but the

C  O  M  M  O  N      C  O  L  D

we seem to be experts in giving one another

on any given day

at any given moment.       .       .

Isn’t  THAT  the  worst?

Is it  REALLY  just because we’re different?

I remember my best friend when I was in third grade was Nathan. We were inseparable. Every waking moment, especially in the Summer, we were playing football, baseball or hide-and-seek and any other game we’d make up on the run. We traded baseball cards and had camp-out-sleep-on-the-living-room-floors sleep overs. We shared everything but his grandmother hated me; wouldn’t let me on her front porch or in their yard because I was a Lutheran and he,

    .     .     .they were Catholic;

Somehow that brought out her Common Cold

.      .      .and it could kick the furnace on in a heat wave.

The Social Scientists will tell us

it’s all ingrained in us since our Cave Woman/Man days

when we fought over food or pelts or fire wood or a certain corner in the cave;

Maybe this is wired in us,

this ME-FIRST attitude

or my Tribe first,

my family,

my nation

first,

the idea of attacking someone first out of fear

that something will be taken from us.          .          ..

But more and more I’m finding I really am

S E A R C H I N G

N E E D I N G

an  U N-C O M M O N   C O L D.

It’s always seemed as if we have had to

O   V   E   R   C   O   M   E

each other in order to guarantee our survival;

now more and more.        .        .

isn’t  it  that  we  are  actually

D      I      S      C      O      V      E      R      I      N      G

new ways of relating to one another,

and here’s the KICKER,

we actually need each other to accomplish THIS!

When we  IMAGINE 

that the person,

known or unknown

before us might be having the worst day of THEIR lives,
that  THEIR  suffering is actually our Suffering.         .         .

it’s utterly amazing how the Common Cold becomes vastly more

M O R E    U N C O M M O N

Now, THAT’S   NOTHING   TO   SNEEZE   AT. . . .

Ahhhhhhhhhhh,

a life without thick gloves and thicker shoes.       .       .

because

O     U     R           W     A     R     M     T     H

is sufficient!

(or maybe we keep sending our feelings/emotions and ourselves way past the Moon and Mars before ever getting around to curing THE COMMON COLD?)