When we recognise that life is cause and effect we can change any circumstance.

I was so grateful for the danish medical system

I was lying in a hospital bed about to go into the first surgery of my life.

At no cost to me.

Having not yet earned any money in the country.

Incredible really.

5 months into being in the country it was a running joke that Denmark was trying to kill me I had developed chronic asthma seemingly out of nowhere on arriving in the country among other things.

Anyway, back to the story. I had been chopping down trees all day at the summer house in Gileleje.

At the end of the day as I lay down to sleep, my wife leaned over me and pointed out two problems.

I had a hernia sticking out of my belly button and blood poisoning in my arm.

We made our way to the hospital and after a pretty intense if slightly amusing grilling from the doctor to make sure I wasn’t a heroine addict I left with medication for the blood poisoning and an appointment for surgery.

On the day of the surgery the doctor asked if I minded if he tried something that might hurt but avoid surgery.

He climbed up on the table and put all his weight on this thumb and tried to push it back in.

It hurt.

It didn’t work.

I had to surgery to pop it back in but nothing implanted.

If felt like I’d entered a perfect storm:

Asthma
Eczema
Blood poisoning
Hernia
Back pain

All since arriving in Denmark.

All good now.

I’m years free of all of these now and I’m not going to go into detail on each of them because this post will lose its helpfulness.

But they were all connected in two ways:

1. The environment I was spending time in
2. My habits at the time.

Easy to read that and think, bad places and bad habits but there is no such thing really. There is just cause and effect.

Good and bad brings in guilt and self judgement that serves only to confuse things.

When I acknowledged that I was causing the effects somehow I was free to investigate and make changes.

I moved to a new home, I ran some habit experiments and within 30 days all of these problems had gone.

When we recognise that life is cause and effect we can change any circumstance.

When we get caught in should and shouldn’t and what we wish were true we often get trapped in a cycle of wishing things were different but changing little.