I.29 — The Body

Attention does not float free of the body it lives in. It runs on the same tiredness, the same hunger, the same knot of tension in the shoulders that everything else runs on, and it is worth checking there before looking anywhere more complicated.

Hunger, tiredness, a held tightness in the jaw or the chest, these usually get treated as interruptions to the real business of a day, background noise to push through. Treat them instead as things to look at. A dark mood, a short temper, a mind that will not settle: before searching for a deeper reason, look for a plainer one, and see whether the body has been asking for something all morning and being ignored.

Try it the next time a day turns gray. Ask when the last meal was, and the last full night, and where the body is holding itself tight right now. Then feed it, or rest it, or let the shoulders down, and watch whether the mood was the weather it claimed to be or the body speaking in the only voice it had.

The instrument has a case, and the case needs keeping. A lamp with a cracked housing burns unevenly no matter how good the flame is. Try the check today before trusting the mood.