Topic Assignment: What do you say, or how do you respond to those who offer unsolicited or unhelpful advice?
====================================
Everything depends on what they say. If they tell me how good I look, I understand that they mean that I look much better than your average dead person who’s been in the ground for the past few months, but that doesn’t bother me. I just say, “Thanks.”
If they tell me that I should immediately switch to a macrobiotic diet or some other diet du jour, I smile and tell them that a person has to have priorities, and food is one of them for me. You can tell. Just look at me. I’ve had lots of hospice patients whose wives made them stick to one miserable diet or another, and they died anyway. It’s never the husbands who get insistent on particular diets, it’s always the wives.
If they tell me they’re praying for me, I thank them and point out that I’m not good at praying myself so, just in case prayer actually works, I appreciate their help. If there’s time, I point out that there was actually a controlled study that showed that remote intercessory prayer seemed to have a beneficial effect on the patients who got the prayers as opposed to the people in the control group who didn’t get the prayers. The prayers were quite remote. The people doing the praying didn't know what hospital the patients were in. They were just told the patients' first names. Unfortunately, when the study was repeated to see if it would work again, it didn’t.
So far, nobody has advised me to get a mango colonic. I like mango juice, but I'm not a fan of colonics.
No comments:
Post a Comment