In a very recent and particularly miserable bout with the flu, I was reminded of Confucius’s utterance that “a healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one.” Very few things are as useful as ill health for reminding us of the good things we take for granted—and for those of us who enjoy generally good health, the suffering of an occasional winter malady affords us an opportunity to take stock and realize how fortunate we usually are.

Among the problems of the “taking things for granted” on a larger scale, is what we might call the normalcy bias—the tendency to think that our world is simply the way a world should be and that all things will gravitate back to being “like this” regardless of how bizarre things actually get. As important as it is to be grateful for the “normal,” whether that means good health or a functioning society, it is equally important to realize the value of the abnormal—the occasional illness and social disfunction—because without it we will almost certainly take the good for granted. It is critical however, not to miss the opportunity to take stock and take therapeutic action where needed so as to honor properly the illness when it appears in its teaching guise.

We hear much in the media these days about “resets” of one kind or another. The “masters of the universe,” whether at the World Economic Forum or the Federal Reserve Board seem to be admitting that they have not been managing human affairs very well if they are telling us now that there needs to be a “reset” of planetary society. For over one hundred years they’ve been telling us that they’re the ones keeping everything smooth, unruffled and stable. The world wars, avoidable financial depressions, orchestrated epidemics of disease, and categorically harmful medicines are not only proof that the masters have failed to keep order, but are more likely evidence of their deliberate actions to destroy it. Their mismanagement is the sickness humanity is suffering at the moment. If our failure to notice this has largely contributed to the disease, we can take heart in the fact that we still possess the ability to wake up—to get healthy—to take stock, and to engineer a reset of our own. We can start by saying “no” to plans and projects that are destructive to the well-being of humanity, and “yes” to things that encourage the health of bodies public and private. There may not be much we can do about the price of gold in London, or arms sales to Eastern Europe, but we can all look at our immediate surroundings, determine what is healthy, and what is sick, and act accordingly.

To Confucius’s quip, “A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man wants only one,” I would add a mini-truth of my own: “There are a thousand ways to go mad, but only one way to become sane: follow the Truth where it leads.”