Nothing Happens Overnight

I was walking along the edge of the Fish River Canyon in Namibia with my family this week, the second largest canyon in the world, and was blown away by its beauty. The enormity of it, the different coloured rocks, the shadow-shaded valleys and the sunlit trickle of water flowing through it. The wildlife running and flying around it. It was hard to imagine that this perfect site hadn't always been there, and trying to picture how it may have formed over time became my predominant thought for a while.

Trying to think of the process, the millions of years, the changes upon changes and adaptations required to produce such an outcome, is such a complex web that it feels impossible to work out, unless you take it one logical step at a time.

The Fish River Canyon wasn't carved by one event. It started with the shifting of the earth's plates hundreds of millions of years ago, which set the shape of the valley. Then came glaciers, moving slowly over that same ground for millions more years, grinding it deeper. Only after that did the river itself take over, quietly eroding the inner gorge we see today, drop by drop, over time.

Three separate stages, stacked one on top of the other, to make one outcome.

It dawned on me that this is exactly what I see in practice daily with people's HEALth, lives, spines and nervous systems.

People walk in with headaches, sciatica, migraines, nerve pain, back pain and so on. We see them limp, one shoulder higher than the other, one foot slightly turned out, a head tilting to the side. We look at their x-rays and see the degeneration, the disc narrowing, the compensatory curves, the biomechanical twists and tilts.

Looking at the person with all of this and just thinking the headache comes from an instant pain in the head is as futile as thinking this beautiful canyon just appeared suddenly for us to enjoy. The spine works the same way as that valley. There's usually an initial trauma that shifts things out of place. The body compensates around it. And then daily life, the stress and the wear and tear, slowly deepens whatever was already set in motion.

Once we look at the whole picture and work out where it may have all started, what happened next in reaction or compensation to that, and what that in turn may have caused, we can finally understand the process, and begin to correct the CAUSE.

Hugs and Go explore!