The Noise of the World

On a lovely afternoon in early summer, at a CYO camp in Sonoma, I was flat on my back on a lower bunk in the dormitory. Yellow light streamed in on the wooden walls and the beds. Everyone else was having a party on the last evening of our tai chi workshop, but I was down for the count, felled by a migraine, with nothing to do but wait out its vice-like grip. I pulled the pillow over my head.

We had been outdoors a lot, standing in a circle in the sun. Jane Golden, who led the camp, had become very enthusiastic about qi-gong and taught us many new ones. Tai chi sets are actually versions of qi-gong, meant to optimize energy in the body, mind and spirit using exercises. All of that was wonderful, but, clearly, I had once again allowed in too much of the world.

When I arrived in San Francisco at 23, I began having these occasional sick headaches I couldn’t control. When I began to understand them, I thought of them as “overload” phenomena, which occurred when I had run around too much, been intemperate about food and other things, talked too much. There was often too much sun, sometimes a hormonal component. Finally I began to find I could breathe into them, find the pain and process it consciously. That broke it. I also found that a well-placed aspirin helped.

By the time of the tai chi camp, I was older, the headaches much less common. And in fact I still sometimes stray into “headache territory.” It is unpleasant enough for me to avoid the triggers. Coffee? Forget about it. Red wine? Not hardly. Chocolate? That will do it, if I am not careful. Making my poor eyes read too much? Absolutely. All of these things open us to more input. In my case, it is sometimes more than my body is willing to put up with.

Of course, I generally live in cities, where the noise of the world is obvious with many people living close together. But today, with non-stop streaming and television channels, social media availability and, at least in our case, well-stocked supermarket shelves, it doesn’t matter where you live. If you let it in, the world will find you. It should remind us to protect each other, and particularly impressionable children, from too much too soon.

It’s a fine line to walk. We don’t want to delude ourselves, or our children, about the truth. Reality bites, but it also inspires. We are avid to find our place, anxious to explore and taste, and thrilled by what happens around us. The push and pull of the world and our place in it, is life in its essence.

Thus, we need to foster powerful inner lives so as to be equal to what we decide to let in to our bodies and consciousness. Authentic relationships, mental space for meditation, contemplative reading, and experiences of beauty which we can “bank” against times of fear and danger are all helpful. Journaling, sketching or making music also create a conversation with oneself which becomes an inner life.

Krista Tippett says, “When we talk about spirituality, what we are really talking about is our interior life.” It is easy to get off into the weeds, however. Most of us retain external reference points, traditional examples of love and morality to measure ourselves by. We also check ourselves against each other. Again, representing to each other the push-pull of the world.

In my case, I have been surprised about how much my body has to say about it all. “Okay, go ahead, but you may have to take the consequences!” In a long life of experiences, I am starting to winnow them, separate the wheat from the chaff. I find I am much healthier (i.e. happier) when I eat less sugar, for instance. I don’t need genre fiction, or genre films (the fast food of the mind). And in relationships, I am looking for honesty. Our bodies sense that, as much as our minds. We should never underestimate our wholeness.

Which comes first? According to current science, body and mind are deeply intertwined. And if I go back to David Bohm, the great physicist who tried to see what the quantum world might mean to us, I find this in his Wholeness and the Implicate Order [published in 1996], “There is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but can only be known implicitly, indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux. In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement.”

Quiet time and darkness usually cured my headaches, if nothing else did. I learned to wear a hat in the sun, and have long treated my eyes like the precious windows on the world that they are. What once felt like an affliction, taught me to listen to what my body had to say and trust it. We become who we are through such lessons.