The Receipts Your Body Kept

A cardiologist's confession: I spent the first decade of my career reading other people's bodies very carefully and ignoring my own.

I knew how to read the rhythm strip, the pressure tracing, the echocardiogram. I knew what the numbers meant. I was less skilled, for a long time, at reading the shaking in my own hands, the set of my own jaw, the particular quality of my own fatigue at the end of a night shift that had included a death.

The body keeps honest books. Mine had been keeping them all along. I just was not consulting the ledger.

Your body has been watching. It has noted every thing that your scheduled life did not have time to process. It has kept the receipt for every grief you moved past and every fear you translated into work. It is not accusing you. It is simply accurate.

You don't have to read all the entries today. Start with one. Just one physical sensation that has been present for longer than the current explanation accounts for. Sit with it for three minutes. Ask it what it knows.

The body will answer. It always does.

— Job