Sunday, January 3, 2010

We really don't know

In this day and age it's hard for some of us to believe how much more we could learn about our selves and the world around us. It appears as though we have most everything figured out and for people like me a lot of it is stuff I can't comprehend anyway. Telephone, TV and especially Internet are just plain magic to me. The hints that something like nano technology is just around the corner is just an extreme WOW. Heck I still try to touch the stuff in 3D movies that seems like it's flying around me.

But do we really know as much as we think we do or do we just put it in neat little boxes so it looks like we have it down pat. I'm going to use a well known example to make a point here. For hundreds of years China was completely cut off from the rest of the world. So stuff like medicine and healing took a whole different path than it did in the rest of the world. They developed the amazing acupuncture techniques. It's still used today because it works, in many ways better than our own medicine that is based on giving drugs to treat our sick and wounded.

A problem with advancing technology is that we share our results, so everyone is going on the same path. The history of China should show us that if you don't share technology then you find more paths. That can be a lesson for all things. Even in the world of sport and fitness. We in the "Developed" countries have it down pat with our technology. If that's true how come so many of the "Third World" countries are dominating in the sports of endurance? A Kenyan runner who has never seen a computer or driven a car can beat runners from countries that have the latest in high tech training methods.

Yes we should share what we know but we shouldn't make that mean that we should stop looking for answers to the same questions. We really know very little about our world and our bodies. The next big advancements in health and fitness thinking could very well come from the person who is getting off the couch today and taking their first steps to get their weight down and get in shape. That's why your panda is always looking at what he sees working for himself and others and not so much what's written.

When we start believing we know it all, we usually have a hard time learning more. Just like the Kenyan runner winning the race, he really is glad that the runners behind him have such good high tech training programs. To him he sees it as holding them back, could be he is spot on right.

Thanks for reading.

Rambling Panda

1 comment:

J.S.D. said...

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