Early intervention

Early intervention often makes a difference in treating illness.  I was reminded of this as I made my rounds at last Friday's bread distribution.  The uncle who has one foot amputated on one leg and several toes on the other, because of diabetes.  It didn't have to be that way, had it been detected earlier.  A change in lifestyle, diet and medication would have made a difference.

On the other hand, the grandmother lovingly looking after two grandkids, both with autism - but the good thing is that both have recently received access to Pathlight school, and hopefully all the intervention and help needed to cope.

Intervention matters even for relatively minor maladies, like my friend who has bunions.  I popped by to see how she was doing, and it turns out that her bunions are so bad that her toes are permanently crossed, and it hurts too much to insert the bunion gel pad.  I remember that more than a year ago, she had suffered a bad cut on her foot, and when I saw her, her foot had already turned black!  I was naturally alarmed and told her she HAD to see the doctor.  So she did, and promptly went for an operation to clean out the wound. 

But I think the protracted period of time in which she had her foot wrapped in bandages thereafter, during which she continued to walk around, probably contributed to the bunions forming.  I just wish I had been close enough to notice earlier, and to tell her to use the bunion gel pad - if so, we might have avoided her current problem as well.

As I often say to my friends and volunteers - this is the thing that's special and precious about our work among the residents.  We don't cover a huge amount of ground - we distribute about 200 loaves of bread each time to just a single block of flats, and we have no current intention to make our effort much bigger.  We don't need (nor do our friends want) the publicity, and we don't plan to be a big charity, with news coverage and awards. 

Why?  Because our work is deliberately non-scalable.  We don't distribute bread.  We distribute friendship.  We're here to spend time and there are no economies of scale for that.  It simply takes time to know our friends and their issues and do something about them - to be close enough so that we can intervene early when we need to.

It seems to me that the idea of identifying the problem and intervening early applies to life in general.  Some of us are so sold out on our work that we put aside our family and spiritual lives to the side.  And the bill always comes due in the end.  There are consequences for our family and our peace of mind.  Waiting till we're retired to do the things we were supposed to when we had our energy and ability is generally speaking Not A Good Idea.  Because the things we're supposed to do are often no longer there to be done - they've moved on!

Some of us are busy building our own castles - houses, cars and possessions.  Others are busy building dreams vicariously through our children - obsessing over enrichment classes, spending hours drilling them on spelling and maths, planning for their future.  Then there are those of us who flit from flower to flower, this day on some hobby or other, and the next day on some other thing that's caught our momentary attention.

Over the weekend, I heard this said - some of us are lucky enough to go on holidays.  We may even get to stay in nice hotel rooms.  But no one worries about buying or acquiring stuff to decorate our hotel rooms.  We stay, we enjoy the room, but then we leave, to return home.  Our whole time on earth is just like that - we're here to stay in a hotel room.  It's a short stay, and then we return home.  Yet so many of us worry about getting stuff to decorate the hotel room.  We spend money to buy new sheets, acquire knick-knacks to hang up on the walls, and accumulate stuff to fill the place up.

Why don't we spend our time and effort and resources to build up what's important for our real home instead? And why don't we start early, instead of waiting till later, when we've already wasted years accumulating all sorts of junk in our hotel room, which only serves to weigh us down, and which we can't take with us?  It's never too late to change this strange and pointless lifestyle - but the longer we wait, the harder it is to chuck the junk we've accumulated, and the bigger the consequences we have to deal with.

There is a better way to live - if you ever want to talk about it, you know where to find me :)

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