The needs of the body and the needs of the soul

Managing the tension within us and between us

The tension within us and between us comes from the problem of how to rightly care for our bodies and our souls.

Scarcity, fears, desires, excess, love, animosity, affection, rejection all seem to have a rightful place yet that perfect positioning is not clear. 

The needs of the body often seem to exist in opposition to the needs of the soul. And even the needs of the body themselves seem to be in opposition. Too much stress leads to breakdown. Too much rest leads to breakdown. 

We humans seem to always be breaking down because of something that we did ourselves. 

With the soul as well, too much stress leads to breakdown and not enough stress leads to breakdown. 

Managing this tension between degrees of stress is the core work of creativity. 

How to balance our need for comfort and adventure,  work and play, the physical and the spiritual, the functional and the aesthetic, the mind and the heart?

This question of balance of the soul and body is at the heart of Greek philosophy.

A while back reading Plato’s The Republic I cam across this passage where Socrates is discussing why the warriors of his city needed education first on gentleness more than strength training.

“of course, gymnastic for bodies and music for the soul.” 

“Yes, it is.” 

“Won’t we begin educating in music before gymnastic?”

“Of course.”

— The Republic of Plato

Education in music before gymnastics. Of course. Cultivating a sense of beauty and order and harmony before the needs of strength training surprised me.

This happens often when I read from classics. There is a beautiful exploration of wisdom from so many years ago that is perfectly relevant for today.

And it rings true for me, now. 

The harmony and melody and rhythm of music are an education on what’s possible in a world of discord, dissonance and seeming randomness. 

We listen and ingest and know that something beautiful is possible and that beauty is part of our being and our becoming. We can all make sounds, beautiful and not. And there is an immediacy to the appreciation of music that needs no education to begin. We all love harmonic tones, and education deepens this appreciation.

But the appreciation is within us already. But that’s not all that is within us.

Reflecting on melody is an education on the possibility of joining together the needs of the body and the soul.

The emergence of melody and harmony from within ourselves is a mystery that uncomfortably lies beside the emergence of all that is not melody, not harmony. 

Therefore tension arises each day within and without. 

How to manage? What to do?

It’s easy to see in many commercial enterprises the willingness to “serve” easy solutions to the body and soul that quickly become corrosive.

Technology accelerates the potential for excess ease, excess entertainment, excess… 

Often the struggle between the easy path and the hard path is surrendered. 

So it is with education of the soul. 

We are never all we could be in the moment. We are always becoming. 

The challenge we face is that so much information swirls around our minds and in our lives without clear significance and generally clear insignificance. 

Knowledge is lacking. Wisdom is almost absent.

Jonathan Haidt, a writer, professor, will ask his students these series of questions:

Where do you go for information?

Where do you go for knowledge?

Where do you go for wisdom?

The answers to the first is obvious and easy for the students. The answers to the last are sadly lacking or absent. The sources of wisdom are being severed by ideology and technology, also by societal cycles that no one controls.

So I’ve turned to the near and ancient past for ideas that stand through time with strength. 

We may rely on ourselves with the pretense that all the beauty of the world exists within us. And while it’s true that all the great and beautiful realities of yesterday are contained within us, that’s not all that’s there.

Sorting through the useful and the ugly is our task. 

How we orient ourselves in the world is the core challenge. What we seek we become. 

Recently in Big Sur a woman died, her body found at the base of a delicate ephemeral waterfall.

A tragic ending to a young life in a most beautiful setting.

I’ve walked to the base of that waterfall, drank its water and cooled off in it’s spray on a hot day. The area is magical and rich and dangerous too.

It’s a favorite locale of mine to explore.

There are years when the flowers bloom so richly that each breath is fragrant for miles of walking. There are years when the hillsides are awash in purple and white flowers. Mushrooms abound and birdsong accent the day.

Each season brings unique beauty and austerities. But the beauty is what I seek and the obstacles are worth the braving.

Not far from the site of the woman’s final breath is a segment of creek that beckons each year. This year I managed to capture what is perhaps my new favorite photo of this particular segment. 

The challenge of the location is the light, the glare of the reflected light of the light colored stone, the movement of the trees in the breeze, the movement of the water…all these components must be incorporated properly to result in an photograph that’s honest and beautiful.

Along the creek you close your eyes and hear the serenity, you close your ears and eyes and feel the breeze. Near sunset, I often watch a family of ducks happily ride the creeks rapids. The ducklings have an exciting time of it with the mother resting into the flow.

Sometimes I encounter the scattered remains of a deer that was a meal. 

Life and death all part of the cycle and flow.

This location feeds my body and my soul and always reminds me of the tension that we all must manage in our own lives and in our own ways, creatively. 

In a world of swirling information and images we ought to carefully and thoughtfully seek the good, true and beautiful. We must filter harshly the offerings of the world and curate for ourselves the ideas, images and practices that will sustain our bodies and souls so that we may align with the Truth and the Beauty.

This is now an active and persistent fight. Every day I get sent online clips of humor and “insight” neatly packaged to gain my attention.

Exploring wild places on trail and off trail keeps me walking the way and thankful for those that came before that walked the way as well.

We must fight the ease of accessing information and press on towards wisdom.

There is so much wisdom in the past, and so much information in the present masking itself as wisdom.

It’s no wonder that Stoicism is having a resurgent moment. Decades after the university humanities departments largely severed its roots in antiquity, popular authors like Ryan Holiday and others reintroduce ideas from antiquity and find a ready and willing audience. Signal cuts through the noise.

Now more than ever in an era of transient ideas the pillars of human civilizations past are relevant and needed.

We don’t know it all and can’t but we can filter the cheap and easy and pursue the meaningful and the valuable.

If we aren’t happy with the current state of our creative output reflection on inputs is a primary place to reflect. 

What are we filling our minds with? What are the ideas that we are resting on? What flow of ideas are we meditating on?