I sing the body electric
Hello you figment of my imagination.
I will admit, loyal readers, that we have been spending a lot of time dabbling in the esoteric lately. There is something about this weekly opportunity to reflect on life that sends my head into the clouds. But not this week! You see, my head is part of my body, and it is my body that I want to talk about. So here we go: my two feet are firmly planted on the ground, and those feet are connected to ankles are connected to legs are connected to torso is connected to arms are connected to a head... in the clouds... and there we are again...
I jest, I jest. Sort of.
This week, I wanted to come back to earth a bit. While I have inevitably and perpetually been thinking about consciousness and the nature of reality, with a few recent medical appointments under my belt, I have also been thinking about the meat sacks where undertake these ruminations: aka our beautiful, broken, bountiful bodies.
Despite popular rhetoric, it is not actually true that our body completely regenerates every 7 years. In reality, it can take up to 15 years, with a wide variation of what cell regenerates when: some cells never regenerate (like those in your eye), and some regenerate every few hours (like in your digestive system). However, even with this more accurate and complex picture of cell regeneration in the human body, I still find it ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING that our sense of who we are (ie: consciousness) grows and evolves over time as we make our way through this world-- and at the same time, our meat sack is slowly replacing itself cell by cell until the vast majority of the body we occupied a mere decade earlier is essentially reduced to house dust, dryer lint and fertilizer.
This is not a new insight-- it is basically the classic Ship of Theseus philosophical thought experiment applied to a human being-- but it all feels a lot more personal and important when you use this thought experiment to contemplate the nature of your own existence. It forces a person to think about who they actually are: a body or a consciousness. Choosing either leads to a pandora's box of conclusions that flow from it...
But I digress. Kinda.
As I get older, I have become more aware of what is and isn't working in my body, and as I inch towards my 42nd birthday this fall, I am starting to have to grapple with some of those realities. Let's be honest though: I have never been a particularly robust specimen of humanity. In addition to the asthma, arrhythmia and allergies, I started to lose my eyesight at the ripe old age of 6, which is also when I started navigating a bunch of auto-immune issues that have evolved throughout my life (one of which has most recently blossomed into full-blown psoriatic arthritis-- joy!). Pile on the many bouts of pneumonia, respiratory illnesses and gastro bugs over the years, and honestly, I was VERY lucky to have shuffled on to this mortal coil at the time and in the place that I did. There are lots of alternate universes where I did not make it to 41 years of age, let alone 14, let alone 4.
I am laying all of this out-- not to be morose-- but to acknowledge the privileged circumstances of my birth which have allowed me and my meat sack to get this far in life (PS: for those keeping score, that was a hint about which side I fall on with the Ship of Theseus thought experiment... if it wasn't obvious), and also to be grateful for all of the joy, wisdom and awesomeness I have been able to squeeze out of this somewhat-broken body despite its inauspicious beginnings and its ongoing evolution/devolution as I age.
To honor this privilege and the journey so far, I do want to try to be more aware of my body, not just for maintenance purposes, but also because in this hyper-digital age, we have lost touch with our bodies. I found this article, and the concept of interoception, quite interesting. In short, 'interoception is a process by which our brains/minds make sense of our internal bodily signals, which serve as a running commentary or mental map of the body’s internal world across conscious and unconscious levels of perception.' And we have become very poor interoceptors. Of course I am drawn to this concept because of the mind-body connection (and don't get me started on how the germs in our guts are talking to our brains-- so cool!), but the research goes deeper than that. Indeed,"in this age of disembodiment, learning to attend to signals from within [our bodies] could ... reconnect long-lost networks of perception that used to root us to the world, to inform our experience of love, affection, belonging and coherence with our environment. We perhaps need that now more than ever."
One simple thing we can do to get back in touch with our bodies and get more rooted in the world is to tap into the power of the hug, for example. I was recently reading this article on the importance of touch, which was published in the context of some US political drama, but it makes a similar point that "even as evidence of the importance of physical touch has piled up, the world has been moving in the opposite direction." So I want to start listening to that evidence a bit more. Western culture has long ignored or even shunned the connection between our bodies and our minds, but there are so many cool examples of how our senses can deeply affect our perception and experience of the world, and there is so much untapped potential to explore as we further our understanding of the mind-body connection.
Even with its perpetual and ongoing brokenness, I am surprised to find that I have actually never loved my body more than I do right now. My younger self tended to protest a lot more against the meat machine, influenced by society and thus often colored by feelings of resentment, frustration or even anger. But as cheesy as it sounds, now most of what I feel for my body is respect-- like an old war buddy. That's not to say that it doesn't frustrate me when I get sick or it fails me in some way. But we are on this journey together, me and my bod, and we have been through a lot. As I continue to dabble in the esoteric-- exploring what it means to be human and the nature of consciousness-- all of this dabbling has not really taken me further from my body at all, and in fact seems to have helped me better understand and appreciate how they work together. So when it comes to my body and consciousness, I WHOLEHEARTEDLY SHIP THEM!
(PS: Oblique Ship of Theseus pun intended, and here is a 'I ship them' reference from Urban Dictionary for my older readers).
Okay. You get it.
As if this dispatch wasn't long enough, here are just a few other articles I have read recently related to this topic that make for interesting further reading:
We have all heard of the placebo effect, but how about the nocebo effect? Proof once again that it is ridiculous to pretend the mind and body should be treated separately
And speaking of placebos and nocebos, have you seen the recent reporting on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of vitamin supplements? I am still committed to my daily (cheap) vitamin D, but it did give me pause
In case you haven't yet, I invite you to check out the recent revamp to Canada's food guide--- it is so much more accurate and comprehensive than previous iterations, taking a whole-person approach to nutrition and wellness
But wait! Is all this talk of bodies making you queasy? (I bet my dear Uncle Lance stopped reading after the first paragraph...) If so, please take a break from all the body talk by enjoying this video of a man serenading his cows with a trombone.
BONUS: in case you don't know where the subject line for this dispatch comes from, you can check out "I sing the body electric" from the movie Fame, or if you are feeling more high brow, the original poem by Walt Whitman.
From one happily conscious meat sack to another, I am glad that we can enjoy the power of a hug together (at least virtually). I hope you enjoyed this dispatch, and have a body-love-filled week!
Until next Sunday,
The Earnest Platypus