Health Beyond Civilization

As you can tell, this blog is about “health beyond civilization.” One of its premises is that modern industrial civilization will end — whether with a bang or a whimper, I don’t know. That point is well-argued elsewhere, and those topics won’t be covered here.

But one thing that must be discussed before we can embark on any other kind of discussion is the first part of that title — namely, health. What is it?

The easiest definition of health is that it is the absence of illness. For many people in civilization, and certainly for the insurance companies, this does the trick. But this is an entirely unsatisfactory definition. All it does is allow people to maintain a minimum of functioning, ignoring all of the more subtle activities and processes at play in the human bodymind. But because most people think of health in just such a broad and vague way, they often have no way of labeling or describing the minor inconveniences they have.

“I’m basically healthy,” you say, “but I just have hay fever when pollen season hits.”

“I’m fine, I just get headaches every so often when I’m stressed.”

“I’m doing great, except I had to get stronger glasses. But hey, everyone wears glasses these days.”

“I can’t walk too far, but all I need to do is drive around and sit at the computer, so who cares?”

No, unless you’ve got high cholesterol, high blood pressure, overweight, or some other number that can be measured, you’re considered fine by medical standards. And being fine by medical standards, you think you are fine.

Are you?

In a way, everyone alive is fine to the extent that you are alive and you function. Biology is a marvel of design and engineering. You walk, talk, laugh, sleep, eat, have sex. These are miracles, in each and every event.

And yet, something is profoundly wrong. We have 24-hour gyms. Dating games. Sitcoms. Diet programs. Sleep disorder clinics. Magazines with sex tips. People just don’t seem to be doing that well with themselves, with their fine, to the extent that even these simple miracles of life that should be easy to enjoy are filled with problems.

“Fine” is insufficient.

Health is quality. Health is equilibrium. Health is that state of consciousness in which you feel acutely how very alive you are, from the highs down to the lows, and you embody it fully.

How many of us can do that? How many of us are there?

Very few. Thus, health has to be a journey, away from the comfort and familiarity and security of the merely “fine,” into the strange territory of sensation and experience that are your own bodily functions. It does matter how you feel when you pee. It does matter how you feel after you eat. It does matter if your hips feel a little bit tight after you’ve been sitting for awhile. All these things do matter.

And why are they important? They’re important in the same way a bird’s song is important or the bugs in the dirt are important. Not to obsess about, but to be gently acquainted with, simply because they are there and because they fulfill their functions in the cosmos. If the birds stop singing and the bugs die, maybe something’s wrong. Likewise, the better you know yourself, the better you can feel when something goes wrong.

I can’t rightly define health as anything specific. It’s not an absence of anything. It’s the presence of life. The more in tune you are with the presence of life within yourself as well as outside yourself, the clearer it will be when that presence is shut off or disrupted in your being; and then you’ll know you’re sick. Thus, health is a constant journey of expanding and deepening self-knowledge.

We all would like to be strong enough to survive a trek in the desert like the Bedouin, or run a hundred miles without breathing hard as the Apache runners did, or run for days chasing down game as the Kalahari Bushmen did. Of course each of those activities takes lots of specific technical knowledge and experience in running or stalking or tracking or hunting. But prior to all of those things, it takes a basic level of health — health that many of us don’t have.

So, the journey of health starts with beginning just where we are. From here, we take our first tiny steps toward reclaiming the physical potency that is our human birthright. And we do our best, and let fate take care of the rest.