ACHOO! May you walk in darkness.

I think a lot early in the morning. Especially when I don't have the luxury of being able to slowly and naturally ease my way out of the sack. Like every day I work. I bolt out of bed still half asleep like most of God's children SHOULD be at or before 5 AM, and have some really furious action in my head. It could be residual dream state so I'm not sure about the quality of the thoughts until I have a coffee and a shower and am able to evaluate them without the cobwebs of sleep skewing my perception. You know how you can have a dream in which you have this earth-shaking idea or invent a fantastic new device or hear a joke that while you are asleep seems like it's the most hilarious thing you've ever heard, then you awake, possibly laughing, jot it down and return to the land of slumber from whence it came. The next day you read that hastily jotted joke or that idea with all of your faculties fully functioning and it's an absolute dud! Ever happen to you? That happens to me a lot.

During my commute to work I am usually showered and my caffeine thirst is sufficiently slaked but I'm not convinced I fully wake up until I do my first patrol or hand out my first parking pass of the day and am forced to slam myself into responsibility mode. Then I just think about work usually. It is for this reason that this blog is often filled with contemplations originating on a bus or the C-train. Today's post will be one of those.

I was riding the C-train and 4 guys dressed in orange coveralls and work boots splattered with dried mud from previous days on the job got on. They were chatting away. I am almost certain that none of them knew the person sitting beside me. Then the person sitting beside me sneezed. Immediately one of the coverallers leans down, (because they were standing and the guy beside me was sitting), and says, "Bless you!" Boy that got the old wheels a-turning and the gears a-grinding in my head! What is this compulsion for people to bless other people after a sneeze? I remember the first thing I thought of was my grade school teacher, Mr. Ottawell, explaining that in the olden days people thought a sneeze was an evil spirit escaping or that after a sneeze you were vulnerable to evil spirits getting IN. Either way it required a kindly blessing. It was just common courtesy to gird up one's loins with truth, slap on the breastplate of righteousness, arm oneself with the Word and slay that evil sneeze demon as a solid Christian soldier. Even for a total stranger. That's what got me thinking. I thought, "What if this guy who just sneezed was a Satanist? Or agnostic, atheist, some non-Christian religion, or what have you?" Mr. Coverall was forcing his faith on someone who just might not want it! Why, in Canada he may well have been cited on the spot for cultural or religious imposition and forced to attend publically funded sensitivity training for a few months. I then began picturing this coveraller as the skinny priest from the Exorcist flinging holy water on the guy beside me and hollering, "THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELLS YOU! THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELLS YOU!" And the guy beside me smokily melting like the Wicked Witch of the West screaming, "OOOOOHH NOOOOOO!" I actually chuckled at myself a bit, trying my best to hide it from my fellow commuters. I chuckle both at the spectacle I had conjured up in my head and at the fact that so much of what goes on in there is directly linked to some movie or another. The power of entertainment!

The guy beside me didn't thank the blesser. This, I have found, can upset a sneezer. Have you ever had someone around you sneeze and then get all snotty, pardon that intentionally placed pun, and say, "Well? Isn't anyone going to say 'Bless you?'" I have. For all we know Mr. Coverall may be rewarded in Heaven for his act of punicharity. But he got no gratitude from the guy beside me! And this is flu season! For all we know he could have filled our car with millions of H1N1 germs and the magnanimity of the person who actually BLESSED him for doing so went unacknowledged. The nerve!

Then I started thinking of other bodily expulsions we don't get blessed for. When we burp or fart we may not be blasting out anything as dangerous as flu germs but the gas can be quite unpleasant. So we excuse ourselves as if to say, "Sorry for polluting the air we share." Why don't we say that after we sneeze? I guess we sometimes do, but not nearly as often and it occurred to me that sneeze germs warrant more apology than a few moments of burp or fart vapour. And I wonder why people in the olden days didn't believe a burp gave just as much opportunity for an evil spirit to invade the belcher's body. I guess I can understand the fart on this point because if I were a spirit, evil or not, I think I too would choose my aperture of entry carefully.

Then I thought of cultures all over the world. The sneeze blessing is not as uncommon as one might think. In my youth when I lived next door to our Russian Babooshka and Dyedooshka I learned that after a sneeze they said something. It was, "Bud zdorov." This means, "Be healthy." The Romans said, "Salve," which means, "Good health to you." This could be taken as a kind of blessing or it could be, in my mind, a more appropriate order for the person to take better care of him/herself and stop polluting everyone's air with germs. I guess that might depend on the delivery. Pretty much the same in German, "gesundheit" means "health." Loads of people with no German heritage at all say that. Evidently, from my internet research, this has been going on for thousands of years! Romans used to say, "Jupiter preserve you." Jupiter is Zeus to the Greeks. I wonder if the Greeks said, "Zeus preserve you." I don't know but reportedly the Greeks DID say, "Long life," after a sneeze. That's similar to the Chinese who say, "Bai sui," when children sneeze. That means, "May you live 100 years."

If you ask me when a person burps or farts we should be saying this stuff about health and living long lives. I know holding in burps and farts is unhealthy. We've all been in public places, at the office, at a hockey game, in elevators, at church, holding our gases. How many dates have we been on having just eaten a meal that is turning into gas, desperately needing to get rid of some of that gas but politely, maybe even painfully, holding it in to avoid the embarrassment of blasting a fart in front of that special someone who you earnestly want to believe you don't do such hideous things? You also want her/him to believe other totally false things about you too like you are always pulling out chairs, opening doors, paying the check, wearing your good underwear, smelling of lavender, and just being extra polite. But that's dating. And job interviewing. Which really, let's face it, are the same thing. I think if I were interviewing a job candidate and he or she stood up, lifted a leg like Bruce Lee and cracked a loud, noxious fart, I would say two things to her/him: "Good health," because that IS good for the person's health and I want employees who are health conscious because they won't be calling in sick as much and they will work for me for much longer, and, "You're HIRED!" We are taking years off our lives holding in farts and burps, folks! If we could learn to just let these natural body functions fly, maybe our culture would be just a little bit more honest. We'd certainly be more healthy!

But back to the sneeze. I have heard it said that holding one in is also unhealthy. In fact some people believe if you do so, your heart stops. I don't think that's true but it really is a tough thing to do! So let it out. Good health. Live 100 years. That makes a bit more sense when your think of it that way.

What may not make so much sense, (and this was all stuff I thought about on about 10 or 15 minutes of my morning C-train ride, mind you), is the idea of the evil spirits. I doubt there are many people left today who actually believe that, though the institution lives on, but I started thinking about myself and my sneezing habits. I have eyes that are not very good at what they are supposed to be doing and are very sensitive to light. Though I am an organ donor, I doubt there's gonna be a line-up of people who want my eyes when I'm freshly deceased. Almost every time I leave a building and walk into bright sunlight I will sneeze. So I got to thinking. Light. We have heard Jesus called the light of the world. In fact I'm pretty sure he said that himself along with, "Whoever follows me shall not walk in darkness." Jews light candles during their Feast of Tabernacles. The epiphany that brings one to ultimate understanding and a state of oneness with everything in Buddhist and Taoist philosophy is often called, "Enlightenment." Light is just associated with God and good and darkness is associated with evil. So why is it that light makes me sneeze so often and opens me up to the ravages of evil spirits? That doesn't make sense, does it? When it's dark I rarely sneeze. So why don't people say, "May you walk in darkness," after a sneeze. It would be healthier, good for longevity and it would limit the openings for evil spirits to pass in and out of the transoms of our open mouths.

So there you have it. It would make so much more sense, for ALL reasons, if after a sneeze we wished the sneezer a healthy, lengthy, germ-free journey in darkness. I'm going to start saying that. You don't have to, but I think I will. Somebody sneeze around me, please! I want to try this out!