Health Beyond Civilization

The Beijing Olympics are in full swing, and Michael Phelps is getting a lot of hype as the greatest Olympian ever, i.e. having won the most career gold medals, as well as shattering a lot of world records for speed. Seeing the attention paid to Olympic sports and herculean athletic feats, and to Tiger Woods’ recent epic tournament win among other things, gives me pause for thought.

Sometimes I compare myself with those athletes and it makes me feel, not inadequate, but profoundly puzzled. I look at the statistics on growing obesity and health problems on the one hand, and the massive adulation (and salaries) given to sports figures on the other, and it makes me think something is not quite right.

Part of the problem, I believe, is that virtually all of the modern sports do not even touch on the basic philosophy of living life, much less achieve the complete integration and unity of physical activity with living life that should be the foundation of a healthy human being’s relationship with body and nature. Take Olympic swimming as an example. These are essentially very simple races, back and forth in a straight line, in predefined distances. You can train for that, sure, and practice over and over again, expecting the same basic conditions every time. You can become great at it, compete with other athletes who have trained for the exact same circumstances, and win handily over them multiple times in a week to be called one of the greatest athletes ever.

I don’t mean to demean Phelps’ achievements, or Tiger Woods’ achievements, or Lance Armstrong’s achievements; they are remarkable feats. What I do want to do is question the frame.

The frame that says achieving a new world record is important — in most cases, a matter of a few seconds faster than the previous world record — seems, to me, extremely narrow. It’s based on a sort of athletic reductionism. It kind of reminds me of the SAT, where whatever human knowledge you have can be narrowed down to your answers on a multiple-choice test, which is then scored and turned into a number. That’s reductionism applied to the academic field.

But we didn’t evolve to operate in simple situations. It can be admirable to aim for and achieve success in simple frames, but it’s important to recognize it for what it is. But what about that activity — swimming, in this case — set in a larger, more meaningful context of surviving and thriving?

Because really, beyond the Olympic gold and the world record and the accolades, what deeper meaning is there to swimming exactly 200 meters in a straight line in a couple of minutes?

This is a problem that I see endemic to nearly all sports, in fact. Tiger Woods is a phenomenal golfer, but when I look at golf I think, what deeper meaning is there to hitting a ball across a field into a distant hole? What meaning is there to kicking a ball across a field into a goal, or hitting a ball across a court with a racket?

Again, I don’t want to demean the achievements of these athletes. What I want to do is point out the limited nature of their frames, and the artificiality of those activities. This is important, because in my opinion these are the reasons why there’s such a large and growing divide between the average person’s health and waistline and our adulation of athletes.

The frame or circumstances that define the lives of most Americans these days includes a lot of junk food, a lot of sitting around watching TV, a lot of driving, a lot of sitting around in class or work. These are the things that we are required to do in this society to survive. I say this not necessarily as a condemnation, just an observation. Maybe your job is to answer calls 8 hours a day, five days a week, and that’s how you get the bills paid. It’s not your fault that that’s what you have to do, but it means that you, and many other people in our civilization, don’t have to go running or stalking after game, don’t have to walk from the village to the river for water, don’t have to carry loads of firewood or plants or herbs from place to place. Physical activity is not a key part of our survival.

What physical activity there is, then, takes on a different kind of value — a fetish, if you will. You do physical activity to keep the blood pressure and weight down and the heart rate up, to “progressively overload” your muscles and get some definition in those biceps or to trim off the cellulite and the stretch marks. Or maybe you do it to have fun with your friends in a pickup game, or you do it for the glory like Olympic athletes. But whatever you do, it’s pretty much not because you have to.

Not having to do a lot of physical labor for our survival is very freeing; it’s not easy to live off the land. But not having to do any at all — well, then, what do you do with yourself? It forces each of us to create or discover the purpose of being physical. Once conditions are no longer imposed, we have to define those conditions. The more separate those conditions are from the general conditions of our everyday life, the more difficult it is to cross that gap — the less you carry over.

There’s a subtle beauty and power in being physical, in a way that’s of a piece with your whole life, I think, that’s missing if you use your body like a tool or machine, even a well-honed one, to win prizes.

Ideally, prizes should be byproducts of a healthy process of inhabiting the body in meaningful ways. If they are not, if they are the end goal, then after the prize is won, the reason for inhabiting the body has been satisfied and that’s the end of that (unless you set your sights on another prize).

Ideally, physical activity should be of a piece with one’s life, so that living is training, and training is living, and the usual divide between the two that creates such groans and resistance to exercising simply does not exist.

But all of this is hard to achieve.

My life is very sedentary. I go to school, I treat patients in a room all day. I drive back and forth. If I do venture out into physical activity, I lack any meaningful context for it, unless I decide to gear myself toward a sport or a martial art. Sometimes I see clear ways in which I could develop greater physical vitality … but I don’t follow up, because it simply isn’t necessary. And, not being necessary, it tends to take a back seat to those things that are necessary, such as taking time to drive to the grocery store to get the week’s food.

Such an approach feels completely unsustainable, and completely … not wild, not in harmony with my body’s desires and needs.

I suspect the answer, the reintegration of these aspects of experience, will rely, in the short term, on that long-neglected sense of enjoyment of the body — which is definitely not something emphasized in modern athletics, but is instead attention paid to the body’s oft-ignored voice of quiet thankfulness for being.

In the long term, it’s more about recognizing that removing physicality from daily living tasks actually reduces quality of life. It’s about discovering what the balance is between being physical and not overexerting oneself with labor (which is the plight of pretty much everyone else in the world besides those of us in the industrialized nations).

That’s about all I’ve got figured out so far.