Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Monday, April 18, 2011

You've Got Friends All Over You!

The biggest danger of obsessive cleansing and disinfecting is that your whole body (plus all the surfaces around you, for that matter) is constantly covered by microbes. Most of them are harmless to you, and if you think about that for a minute, that makes them much more than "harmless." It makes them extremely beneficial. These invisible breeding, feeding, wriggling beasties are very valuable tenants!

Think of it! A thick film of benign, you-neutral microbes populates every micrometer of your skin's exposed surface. What more effective practical barrier could you ask to any infectious, malign, opportunistic microbe that you might brush up against? That bad germ has scarcely any place to latch on! All the available space is taken up, by teeming hordes of microbes who have no interest in infecting you.

These dudes are your buddies. Your invisible yet staunch allies. They will continue to live happily on your skin, mingling and burbling and feeding and excreting all over your skin. A happy, stable population base that leaves no niche at all for a the unfriendly would-be invader to slip in, occupy, multiply and go nuts burrowing into your unprotected cells!

But in our obsessive, incessant disinfection of these surfaces, we strip that friendly barrier away. All that tender, clean pink skin lies naked and open.

Beckoning the enemy.

4 comments:

JMH said...

This seems applicable to psychotherapy.

dogimo said...

DUDE.

Dude. Please elucidate. I've read and re-read this, and am crazed for your take on what I can't tease out by myself!

dogimo said...

Wait. I might have got it - do you mean just that the obsessive stripping-away of layers of subconscious safeguards to get to the core of what your motivations are also strips away necessary mental defenses, so that no matter what your response becomes, it is necessarily (and needlessly) neurotic??

If that's not it, please say so! I got's ta know, to quote the bankrobber staring down Harry Callahan's .44 Magnum (the most powerful handgun in the world, and will blow your head clean off...)...

Jen said...

"These mosquitos are takin' after me somethin' fierce. I shouldn't've washed off my protective crust."