Healthy Feet, Happy Second Heart

Gentle visitors, Christmas is over, and it is just now that your humble Contributor has been able to collect his thoughts on the season. 

Let's see: gifts included what the French would call cravates, chemises , and pantalons, not to mention livres.  But, unlike the last several years, this Noël was, as the French would say, sans chaussettes.  No matter: my sock drawer positively brims over with every manner of pair -- not unlike Noah's ark as the first drops began to fall.  And, happily, all of these pairs are woven of cotton or wool or such as nature provides, but certainly not of any artificial fiber.  

You see, gentle visitors, your humble Contributor has long valued his feet as vital, but oft neglected, members of the organic whole, notwithstanding their gnarled, club-like appearance to the unenlightened eye.   To clothe them in polyester or rayon would be beneath their dignity.  True, the ancient Occidentals saw the foot as the basest of parts, because it occupied the lowest position in the human frame.  While other Western notions have evolved, not so with regard to the lowly metatarsus.

The Orientals have another, and I think better, view:  or, at least, so I have learned in recent days.  My education began on the 12th day of Christmas when your humble Contributor received a package shipped directly from Huangbin, just down Changxing Road, in Nanshan, Shenzhen Guandong, somewhere in the vast country of China.   Inside the package was the Healthy Foot Massage Mat (or, 健康足部按摩垫, as the people the French call Chinois would say).

(Presumably, this colorful mat was a gift from our poor relations along America's North Coast, who have shown a great concern  for our feet in the past.) 

The Healthy Foot Massage Mat introduced us, in a practical way, to the oriental science of reflexology, or 按摩, which holds that the humble foot directs and controls the entire body, chiefly through various subdivisions from toe to heal.  Hence, for example, the inside of the big toe regulates the function of the trigeminal nerve, even as it also hosts an itinerant colony of fungi and peripatetic lint.

The instructions enclosed with the Healthy Foot Massage Mat give a brief explanation of accumulated Eastern wisdom concerning history, freedom, spirit, health, and feet.  The language is poetic in that it eschews all norms of English grammer and vocabulary.

  To wit:

The using features to human body.  With the continuously development of the society, the walk constantly.  People go out by bus or by bike, up stair have the help of lift. where ever you state at home or work study have trip outside, the shoes won't leave your foot.  And the foot of human have  less and less chance to have exercises as a result, and their function and potential active effect will be less and less as well.  This is not good for the health. It's said.

The argument, in short, is that, what with the industrialization of society, the human foot has come under the jack-boot dominance of the shoe and is thus afflicted.   Naturally, the human foot cries out for the freedom to achieve its potential, but the imperialist shoe steps all over it, forcing it to march "up stair have the help of lift." 

The revolutionary Healthy Foot Massage Mat promises to liberate the downtrodden foot, if it will only have the courage to cast off the bonds of the cursed shoe (to the French, la maudit chaussure) and to walk, in a state of nature, on brightly colored stones of hard plastic manufactured in Shenzhen Guandong.

Since "the ages of middle-aged and old person are on the high side," they are more often bothered by a host of familiar diseases, to numerous to list here; but, the Healthy Foot Massage Mat

has better effect in improving the microcirculation of the second heart of the human body (foot), has better irritative effect to the end of nerves, has better propitiatory  effect to the spirit.

Hence, the foot is more than the "second heart," it is the very gateway to the sole.  Not just for those of us on the high side of the ages, but also for "those people sitting to work in the office and the school and to the operation of the machine for a long time."  Of course, such people are prone to "easy to nervous in mind, have bad memory, be neurasthenic, be in low spirit, have disesase of arthritis, adiposity, inappetence, eczema, and ermatitis," among other maladies.

But, the Healthy Foot Massage Mat, when properly prefaced by large quantities of warm water and significant micturation, promises to relieve these diseases and many more, including troubles of the suprarenal gland, the celiac plexus, and (forgive the clinical detail) the ileocecal valve.

The instructions wisely recommend that the tenderfoot "walk on it with thick socks to ease pain" until he has mastered the podiatric discipline of the Orient. 

Thankfully, socks are in good supply.

Comments

[Donna Shumay]

Dear Remainderman,

We in mind believe constantly, give what hurts.
With emotion from our second heart lower than the tibia place our superior. regards.

Your Poor Relations from the Northcoast