Given my family and I suffered so much trauma and loss in earlier times, I remained intrigued by how people move on despite tragedy. How do people continue to live on? And not just in the flesh. I compared different people from all walks of life’ knowledge, attitudes, perceptions, and mindsets and contrasted them with their ability, readiness, and willingness to change. Change for the better. For the most part, I served communities whereby the people were under-represented. That’s how I first learned about grants. I learned that they run out. I learned it’s possible to not get paid anymore for services provided. But the greatest lesson I learned is it’s possible people, these beautiful people, might not get served anymore. Food and other resources were no longer served to them. By the time I graduated with my B.S. in Dietetics and completed my Internship, I knew that my career that was God-given, not necessarily chosen, yet accepted by grace, was going to be one of a servant leadership variety. You see, the Source of Light gives each one of us unique talents and gifts. It’s up to us to receive our gifts. In turn, we are meant to share our gifts with others.
Equally a passion as food and proper nutrition for me has been body movement or the study of exercise science. I’ve always loved how it feels to be physically active, and I could clearly see the benefits of using both healthy lifestyle behavior changes in tandem as a magic bullet to stay forever young. And so immediately following my Dietetic Internship, I began my graduate studies to receive a M.S. in Cardiac Rehabilitation and Exercise Science. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve never had anything against aging. On the contrary, the opposite of aging is being dead. And I love being alive. Aging is inevitable. My focus has always been on how to not get ‘older’ as in shooting for a healthy lifespan, not a long lifecycle expectancy whereby you collect a host of poor health conditions because if you didn’t use it, you lose it. Keep in mind, I was brought up in the era of ‘supersizing’ meals and the first remote control. There wasn’t much talk about lifestyle medicine, at least not at the tables I was sitting at. What truly piqued my curiosity was when my Gramps became diagnosed with diabetes and he would get so tired of giving himself his own insulin shot that he asked me to give it to him – as he frowned, hunched, and looked away. We’d cycle the injections from the fingers, the arms and the belly. Fancy machines weren’t readily available at the time. And by the looks of Gramps disgruntled grin, the pricks clearly hurt. I remember my astonishment, ‘what do you mean this could have been prevented by backing off from the sweets and walking just a little longer, every day?,’ I’d ask. You see, my Gramps was a retired garbage man and felt he had to move far away from New Jersey to Florida because of the inability to pay taxes. To feed his extended family when we visited, he’d literally jump into large garbage containers at local grocery stores to weed and sift out all of the expired bread, cheese, and produce the stores declared was unsafe to eat. Yes, meat was involved too in his scavenger hunts. People who grew up in the Great Depression tend to hoard. They know what it’s like to go without. They make good with anything you give them and whatever they find. And my maternal ancestors grew up on farms and worked at coal mines, without very much in terms of material things. When they had land with crops, they were frugal and practiced how-to make do with what they had, even if it was scraps. Some of the best stories I remember being told as a young child involved what it’s like to drink goat milk, churn butter, decapitate and defeather and make bedding out of livestock, and even wait for the moonshine to ferment. These stories cultivated an already innate passion for food and agriculture, my genetic footprint, so to speak because they promised aromas, flavors and textures I could only dream of. It was like sugar plums dancing through my head – all year long.
Looking for more? Peruse Chapter 5: Living as a Death Doula of ‘Rise Above: A Playbook On How-To Keep Energy Flowing.’
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
Dr. Jaime L. Pula is the author of her best-selling book titled, ‘Rise Above: A Playbook On How-To Keep Energy Flowing.’ She can be reached at jpula@artofhealthsciences.life. And she enjoys connecting on LI at: www.linkedin.com/in/drjaimelpula001/.