TO YOU

to marg
on sunday i thought i detected a note of criticism or at least surprise when i was talking about my physical health, your words and body language indicating to me you think it is an obsession or a bit neurotic, something quaint and somehow a deviation from common sense or at least the norm. so i want to talk a bit about that in a more organized way, on paper.

life is physical, human life no less than any other expression of life. death is physical too. your moods are physical, involving chemical outputs triggered by other chemicals triggered by events both external and internal that activate gene expression to influence mental as well as physical activity in addition to your feelings, which are thoughts. those thoughts are physical too. they involve electrons in a brain architecture of neural circuitry embedded in a sensing physical body and all their inputs come through that body's sense organs. all life is embedded in a cosmos that is also physical. there is nothing else. as fine as you can cut it, everything is physical all the way down. we are an animal of earth. we have developed uniquely complex neocortical oversight of brain function which has made us what i would call the thoughtful animal. but all animals have thoughts, all animals remember, all animals modify their behavior over time based on experience (otherwise why even have a memory). we are not unique in kind but only by degree.

if you want to have the best life you personally can have (which will not be identical to others for many inherent reasons) it pays most dividends to attend not to your thoughts, which follow, not to your moods, which follow, not even to your ideas, like the ideas i am proposing here, which also follow as an expression of your physical wellbeing. the first requirement of a human who wants to have useful thoughts and feel happy in mood is to be physically fit, strong, with good oxygenation and endurance. i have read a lot of misguided philosophy and a bit of very misguided religion and have found all of it, with the possible exception of george lakoff, to be more or less spastic groping in the dark morass of unsystematic minds. it seems for some reason rather bleak to most people to think of life as "merely" physical. oh, they of little courage! what would they rather it be? the dreams of a wicked god, whatever that is (probably a bit of undigested spinach).

i am having the best life i can muster by paying attention to the one thing i can control in this vast unplanned cosmic manifestation that is self-aware life. i am taking care of my body and it is going to last a lot longer than some others, because death too is entirely physical. even if you don't believe any of this, that would still not be an argument for letting your body decline below its potential for want of simple focus and an uncluttered understanding. most people are victims of themselves, their own worst enemies. i am trying not to be that. and here you can laugh: i think that makes me, even though unusual, the normal one. ;-)