Stress, Digestion, and Plane Seat Assignments.

Bear with me: I am having one of those stream of consciousness days. What can I say, I am on my cycle, so it is going to be a barely coherent blog entry. My husband was getting ready to leave for Orlando this past Saturday, and he wanted to secure his seat assignment on the way back. He called up the airline (think it was American), who told him that if he wanted to secure his own seat assignment on-line, then it would be free, but that if he was going to call up and have his seat assigned by an agent, then there would be a charge. My husband replied, "Well, if I had been able to do it on-line, I certainly would have, but it isn't letting me."

Wait a second, that wasn't my point. My point was that they're even taking this vestige of customer service away from us! How many more human interactions are going to be reduced in the name of corporate profits? We don't go to tellers anymore, we go to ATMs. We don't really call up airline agents anymore, we book tickets and fares online. We don't even talk to a live human being when we have a question about our electric bill before we punch a long string of numbers into the keypad or listen to an interactive voice response system that has me (usually) shouting "NO! NO! NO!!!!!" at the top of my lungs into the phone. And even that isn't really my point. So let me get to it: with less and less human interaction, human touch is even more important. Trust me, we are here on this Earth for each other, and no other reason. I don't care if you had all the blessings in the world, money, cars, clothes, your health, toys, private jets, land, buildings, mansions, yachts, it would not be worth one iota to you if you were the last human being alive.

It breaks my heart to think of all the people who go through life without sufficient human touch. And our lives are getting more complicated, not less. Truly. I was doing herbal consultations all night long at our Midsummer Night's Dream spa party, and what do you think most people wanted as their customized tea blend? EVERY SINGLE CLIENT I saw said she had trouble with stress, anxiety, and digestion. EVERY SINGLE ONE. What does that tell me? Well, we all know stress leads to indigestion. Of course it does, because all the resources that are normally used to properly digest food are being diverted to galvanize us into action, to achieve more and deliver sooner and accelerate our advancement in...whatever....faster. So every single blend I made was pretty much nervine (valerian root, skullcap, chamomile) and digestant (peppermint leaf, licorice root, ginger, cloves, cinnamon, and marshmallow root). I had oodles and oodles of juniper berries left over! Okay, I am digressing again.

Anyway, this all means that spas are more relevant in this day and age. And not just any spa. I am not talking about the kind where you pay to get a MACHINE to work on you. I am talking about the kind where a real person, a human being with a talent for creating a healing sanctuary and the attention to detail to tailor it to your needs and the skills and training to perform a therapeutically excellent service gives you an hour of bliss.

I never understood these spas with machines and such. Why do people pay to be zapped, squeezed, injected, lasered, or rubbed by an electronic device anyway? I never got that and I never will. That's not a spa, that's a....that's what we call torture in some countries.