Mind, body, damage, and growth

There’s a feeling of being alive. It’s hard to explain exactly, but it feels like activity put in a body—the whole of oneself being pushed out into the limits of one’s skin.

Beyond that, there is a world of feelings and temperatures that permeate the skin. We have clothing to protect but also to adore our bodies. We walk upright and feel pleasure and pain from time to time. Simply by stretching or twisting, we can feel and confront the limits within ourselves.

Then there are our minds, huge oceans of activity where our thoughts swirl around like a storm or a gulf stream. We feel confined to our skulls, trapped in an echo chamber where we hear ourselves rattle on about this and that.

The outside world affects the cranial innards but in different ways. It sets the tone of what we think about, creates obstacles and opportunities for our brain to contemplate, and creates games to keep us busy. It builds us up when we’re praised and tears us down when accused or attacked. Despite its protective shell, the mind is much more vulnerable than the body.

Our minds and bodies work in tandem. They send signals back and forth and age together. A deterioration of one part might spread to the other, but this also works in reverse to help support one another in times of trouble or sickness.

Being alive can feel much like an obligation to the bodies we carry around. In one sense we are meant to care for them, but this isn’t the whole story. One part of being alive is to grow, and one way to grow is to break something apart and build it up again.

Far from preserving our mental and physical selves, we stress and extend them to make them grow. Challenges help us feel alive and damage is a way to balance the ecosystems within us.

Numbness is like death, so we avoid this at all costs.