I recently endured my first experience “under anesthesia.” The experience opened my eyes to a few things: namely how many people walk through life in this state.
Sure, all of us need a local anesthetic from time to time. Who wants the dentist drilling without a little Novacane? And isn’t that what a slice of pie is for after a hard day being misunderstood?
This post isn’t about those temporary moments of escapism from the ugliness of life. I spent an entire year escaping into books one time…because those fantasy worlds knew nothing of divorce and abandonment.
Adulthood means you have to face these disappointments, but nothing says you can’t take a break here and there with your local anesthetic of choice.
Living under the influence of the Big Bopper of general anesthesia? That’s what put our world in the ugly bind we’re facing.
Anesthetize: to render physically insensible, as by a substance that produces a general loss of the senses of feeling (pain, heat, cold, touch)
What it Means
There’s the dictionary definition of the word (thank to dictionary.com).
Feeling nothing because a foreign substance has blocked the receptors in your brain.
That was great in the operating room. Scalpels cut into my abdomen. Scopes and tubes moved around in there to locate and remove the offending organs.
I didn’t want to feel any of that. And the doctors wouldn’t have been to concentrate if I had been feeling the pain.
That doesn’t mean my body wasn’t affected. Nope. That’s why I spent a few days with my feet up and holding my side whenever I engaged my abdominal muscles.
Without the anesthetic, my brain registered every dislocated cell.
If we put this on the societal scale, it means we’re allowing something to deaden our sensibilities.
Mental Anesthesia
I’m one of the first people who turns off the news and tunes out the media. They are the biggest perpetrators of spreading a foreign substance.
Most of the time it incites fury or riots. It encourages people to bicker and complain, call for the revocation of second amendment rights.
But it’s still a mental anesthesia.
Why? Because it dulls independent thought.
Rather than disseminating facts and allowing people to draw conclusions, the media anesthetizes us. They decide which bits of information they will share and how to twist it so hearers respond with emotion.
Anesthetize the higher thinking centers of the brain and stimulate the amygdala, where intense feelings come from.
No need for me to dredge up examples of news articles or videos that were constructed in this way. Just mentioning it has reminded everyone reading this of such a story.
Time to Recover
After my surgery, I woke up in the recovery room. It was here that I blinked sleepily and wondered where I was. The last thing I knew, I’d climbed onto the cold operating table.
And now my mouth was the Kalahari Desert and my eyelids refused to remain open.
What would the recovery room look like for your mind? Maybe you get news from independent sources that report facts. You double-check their sources.
Instead of getting emotional, try engaging your mind.
It took several hours before I was alert enough to walk out of the hospital. The rest of the day was mostly a haze of “what’s going on?” but after a good night’s sleep, my brain could function again.
Are we living under mental anesthesia?
If so, how can we sleep off the foreign substance that’s lulled us into such a state?
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