body

i've been thinking a lot about the nature of bodies lately, mostly dredging up things that i've heard somewhere along the way and replaying them in my head over and over and, in a very non-focused way, trying to piece them together. i feel like i'm close to linking them, but haven't quite figured out how they all fit together yet. but i feel like they do, together, make some larger point that i can feel but can't quite articulate yet... maybe this exercise will help, but it may not. it may just turn into a list of things roughly related around the same theme. let's see.

'walking around in this incredible self-contained unit' - thought i had in college that i discussed with pre-med roommate about how everything we need - our hearts, our blood, our brain, everything - is really in this relatively small container, held in by our skin, that's incredibly portable and that we take with us wherever we go. everything about us is contained in this relatively small space, just kept together with skin. that's all we are - just the little bit of space that we occupy and that we carry with us everywhere.

'we are spiritual beings having a physical experience' - bumper sticker

and very related to that:

'You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.' - quote by c.s. lewis

Body is something you need in order to stay
on this planet and you only get one.
And no matter which one you get, it will not
be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful
enough, it will not be fast enough, it will
not keep on for days at a time, but will
pull you down into a sleepy swamp and
demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake.

- from "Living in the Body" by Joyce Sutphen. i particularly like the last two lines or so lines: "will pull you down into a sleepy swamp and demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake" there are a lot of notebooks from late college and, now, work trainings or corporate meetings, that have these words doodled in them. our bodies are our passports to this world. they are the things that let us stay here.

an episode of 'speaking of faith' where a paraplegic yogi talked about his relationship with his body after an accident that left him paralyzed. he said something to the effect that he didn't understand when people who were ill said were fighting their bodies. His view, he said, was that his body was doing everything it could to survive and keep him alive. it wanted to survive. It was working in spite of the injuries, trying it's best to heal and keep him alive.

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i am lucky. i've always been quite healthy, and the trouble that my body has given me has (stereotypically, i know) been related to how my body looks, not how it behaves. except for rock climbing & occasionally giving blood, there is nothing that i have wanted to do that my body wouldn't let me do. but, like so many, i have never been really happy with my body, except for a brief period in 2007 - very brief - maybe 1 or 2 months. other than those 30-60 days, i've identified myself as someone chubby, overweight.

i work for a market research company. last year, one of the surveys we conducted among american men and women showed that people who are within the normal weight range (according to bmi calculations) were more likely to identify themselves as overweight than normal. On the other hand, people who were overweight were more likely to classify themselves as normal. what a clusterfu, well, you know. that's what i thought at the time we released this study. i, who was then technically a normal weight, but who thought of myself as overweight.

fast forward to about a year later, and now, here i am, a living statistic, technically overweight, but still thinking of myself as i was a year ago. 'i thought i was overweight when i was really normal. i thought i was overweight then but i wasn't so i'm probably still normal now so i should go easy on myself.' not so. and weird, how our brains play into all this. i technically KNOW that i'm overweight, but still i can convince at least part of myself that i'm not. just to be clear, that's me, the same person who thought (and thinks) that it was so screwed up that a majority of my countrymen and women have such a non-realistic view of their bodies.

part 1 and part 2 of this post aren't that connected - i didn't even plan on writing part 2 at all when i started. part 1 more about bodies as a positive extension - something that let's us experience this life. part 2 much more petty about the way we define our bodies and what affect their appearances have on us.

no revelation for now, but will keep thinking about this.