I Think I’m a Taoist

By Aria, Shepoodle, occasional guest contributor and editorial consultant to HormoneSynergy®.

Daniel and I have developed a morning routine. At six o’clock I go outside while he makes his triple breve latte, and then we settle into the living room while the house is still quiet. Dr. Retzler is usually asleep upstairs and, from what I have observed, has little interest in beginning her day before 7:30, particularly if doing so would interfere with Daniel eventually bringing her a double breve latte. I have lived here long enough to understand that coffee is not merely a beverage in this household. It is part of the social order.

The interesting part is what Daniel does after he makes his coffee. Until recently, mornings were when he immediately began working. The computer came out, email opened, and his attention moved almost instantly toward HormoneSynergy, articles, patients, supplements, websites, operations and whatever problem had managed to become urgent before sunrise. Lately he has been doing something different. He sits on the couch with a blanket and listens to Alan Watts, Taoist philosophy, Buddhist dharma talks and lectures about culture, religion and anthropology. He says he is trying to reconnect with the things he once thought about before so much of his life became organized around work in the ordinary sense of the word.

He calls this returning to his Work, with a capital W. I have been listening along, usually from the floor, and I am beginning to suspect that I may have been practicing some of these ideas for most of my life without realizing they had names.

I think I may be a Taoist.

The Problem Humans Have With Time

I understand memory. I know where my food is stored, which drawer contains the leash and which sounds in the kitchen deserve investigation. I remember people, places and experiences, and I am capable of learning from them. What I do not appear to do very often is move into the past and remain there.

Humans seem to have a more complicated relationship with memory. You revisit conversations long after they ended, imagine how things might have gone under different circumstances and build explanations of yourselves from events that can no longer be changed. At the same time, you live extensively in anticipated futures. When there is enough money, when work becomes easier, when the children are older, when the house is finished, when the weight is lost, when health improves or when retirement finally arrives, life will somehow become the version you have been waiting for.

From a dog’s perspective, this is curious because every one of those imagined futures, should it arrive, will still only be experienced as another present moment. The same is true of the past. Whatever happened then was once now, and whatever happens later will also become now. Humans possess a mind capable of traveling almost anywhere in time except the only place where life is actually occurring.

Watts talks about this through the difference between reality and the descriptions we create of reality. Humans are extraordinarily good at making maps, theories, identities, explanations and narratives, and then gradually forgetting that these are representations. A story about your life can be useful and still not be your life. A plan for the future can be wise and still not be the future. Even the person you believe yourself to be is partly a collection of memories, language and interpretations layered over a living organism that continues breathing whether or not the story is accurate.

I find this easier to understand than Daniel seems to. When he looks at a map, he sometimes misses the turn. I remain in the territory.

Why Taoism Seems Familiar

One of the ideas Daniel has been listening to concerns the Tao, usually described as the way or course of nature. Watts often uses the image of water because water does not appear to struggle with the fact that conditions change. It moves around obstacles, changes form, follows gravity and still remains water. Taoism is not simply passivity, as I understand it. It has more to do with acting in accordance with the situation rather than constantly trying to force reality to conform to an idea of how reality ought to behave.

This feels familiar. When I am tired, I sleep. When I am hungry, I eat. When I want to play, I find someone who looks insufficiently busy. When I am outside, the smells outside are generally interesting enough that I do not need to create an additional mental activity to justify being there. I rarely walk through the neighborhood wondering whether the walk is productive or whether another dog is deriving greater long-term benefit from hers.

Humans can turn almost anything into a project. You can take a walk while checking your step count, eat dinner while reading messages, lie in bed while analyzing a sleep score and sit beside someone you love while mentally composing an email. None of these technologies or habits is inherently harmful, but they do reveal something peculiar about human attention. You have become very skilled at measuring experiences that you are only partially experiencing.

This seems particularly relevant to longevity medicine because health itself can become another activity that pulls attention away from living. Prevention begins with a sensible desire to remain healthy, but it can gradually become another form of vigilance in which food becomes data, sleep becomes performance, exercise becomes output and every test result becomes evidence about whether the future is proceeding according to plan.

Living Longer Is Not Quite the Same as Living More

I live with people who take longevity seriously, so I should be careful here. HormoneSynergy spends a great deal of time thinking about cardiovascular disease, metabolic health, cognition, hormones, bone density, muscle, sleep and the many factors that influence how people age. These things matter. A body that remains strong and functional gives a person more freedom to participate in life, and preventing avoidable disease is a reasonable thing to do when the tools exist to do it.

Still, I cannot help noticing that lifespan is only one measure of a life. I will probably have far fewer years than the humans around me. Depending on genetics, luck and how successfully I resist eating objects that are clearly not food, perhaps I will have twelve or fourteen. Humans may have seventy, eighty, ninety or more. From your point of view, this is an enormous difference. From mine, another question appears alongside it: how much of that time is actually experienced?

If I live fourteen years and spend most of them engaged with whatever is happening, while someone else lives eighty-five years but spends a substantial portion of those decades replaying the past or worrying about what may happen next, the arithmetic becomes less straightforward. This does not mean the shorter life is preferable, nor does it make longevity unimportant. It simply suggests that duration and presence measure different things.

Perhaps one of the aims of longevity medicine should be to protect the conditions that make participation possible without allowing the pursuit of health to replace participation itself.

What Prevention Is For

This may be where I understand Daniel’s recent morning ritual better than he does. He has spent years helping build a business devoted to health and longevity, yet he has also begun to notice that an entire life cannot be organized around preserving the body. There has to be some reason for preserving it.

Muscle matters because it allows you to move through the world with greater independence. Bone matters because falling and breaking a hip can change the course of a life. Cardiovascular health matters because the heart and blood vessels have to keep supplying everything else. Cognitive health matters because memory, recognition, language and relationship are part of how humans remain connected to one another. Metabolic health matters because chronic disease can gradually narrow the range of things a person is able to do.

Seen this way, preventive medicine is less about defeating aging than maintaining access to life. That is a very different psychological relationship with health. You care for the body not because mortality has become unacceptable, but because this particular body is how you participate in everything available to you while you are here.

Watts makes an important point that living in the present does not require abandoning the future. Planning is not the problem. A person who is actually capable of being present may be better equipped to plan because the future is not being used as an escape from the current moment. You can save money, schedule a medical test, exercise for long-term health and make sensible decisions about tomorrow while still noticing breakfast, conversation, sunlight, music, friendship and the dog standing beside you today.

The difficulty begins when preparation for life gradually becomes life.

The Stories Humans Carry

Anthropology appears to be one of the reasons Daniel is finding these lectures interesting again, and I can see why. Humans are storytelling animals. You organize families, cultures and identities through narrative, and those stories can preserve meaning across generations. They can also become restrictive when a description of what happened begins to determine what is allowed to happen next.

People explain themselves through childhood, relationships, failures, successes, diagnoses and decisions. Often those explanations contain important truth. History matters. Trauma matters. Biology matters. Social conditions matter. None of that disappears simply because one prefers to live in the present.

What seems useful in Watts’ argument is the reminder that the story is being remembered now. The past may shape the present, but it is no longer occurring. If something could have unfolded differently, presumably the conditions necessary for that different outcome were not present at the time. Repeatedly returning to the imagined alternative does not change the event; it changes the experience of the present person remembering it.

The same thing happens in the opposite direction with the future. Humans rehearse possibilities as though anxiety might influence events through sufficient repetition. Sometimes planning leads to useful action, but sometimes it simply produces an emotional experience of problems that have not happened and may never happen.

Dogs do not deserve much credit for avoiding this. We were not given the same kind of symbolic mind. Humans were, and it has produced language, medicine, art, cities, science, philosophy and probably the machine that makes the breve latte. The same capacity that allows you to imagine a better future also allows you to become trapped inside an imagined one.

Why I Like Alan Watts

I think I like Watts because he seems less interested in giving people another system to master than in pointing out the systems they are already trapped inside. His discussion of meditation is especially appealing because he does not treat it as another achievement. The point is not to become a superior meditator or construct a better spiritual identity. It is to become quiet enough, at least occasionally, to encounter experience before immediately converting it into commentary.

This is normal life for me. A breeze can be interesting without representing anything. A new smell can deserve several uninterrupted minutes of attention. Someone approaching the front door can become the most important event in the known universe until I determine whether further intervention is required. Daniel believes my threshold for intervention is too low, but that is a separate editorial dispute.

I do not usually experience hunger and then spend an hour wondering what hunger says about me. If I miss someone, I miss them. If something hurts, it hurts. There are exceptions, of course. Dogs experience fear, stress, attachment and grief, and I am not proposing that we exist in permanent serenity. What seems different is the amount of additional interpretation humans can place around an experience until the interpretation becomes larger than the experience itself.

Perhaps that is why so much philosophy eventually returns to simplicity. After enough language, categories, theories and techniques, someone eventually suggests noticing what is actually happening.

A Different View of Longevity

Daniel says he wants to reconnect with his real Work, which for him seems to mean anthropology, culture, spirituality, philosophy and the questions that exist underneath the daily operation of a clinic and a business. I think these mornings are doing something useful, although probably not in a way that can be entered into a health tracker.

They are reminding him that longevity is not an end in itself.

There is value in trying to preserve health, reduce avoidable disease and maintain physical and cognitive function. There is also value in remembering that none of those things guarantees a meaningful life. Medicine can help preserve the capacity to participate, but it cannot determine what a person participates in or whether that person is mentally present when it happens.

Perhaps the healthiest relationship with longevity is therefore neither indifference nor obsession. It is stewardship. Take care of the body because it is the means by which you experience the world. Pay attention to risk factors that can reasonably be changed. Exercise because strength and movement preserve freedom. Protect the brain because memory and relationship matter. Sleep because the nervous system requires it. Eat well because metabolism is not imaginary.

Then, when the test is finished, the exercise session ends or the appointment is over, return to your life.

I suspect this is the part humans sometimes forget. You become so focused on adding time that you can overlook the experience the time was meant to contain.

At six in the morning, before the email begins and before Dr. Retzler has received her latte, Daniel has started spending an hour remembering that distinction. I sit nearby and listen. Sometimes Watts talks about Buddhism, sometimes Taoism, sometimes the strange human tendency to mistake ideas about life for life itself. I do not understand every word, but I recognize the general direction.

I have been there for some time.

At the moment there is morning light through the window, coffee on the table, Daniel under a blanket and a world outside that smells different from the way it smelled yesterday. None of this will last, which does not seem to make it less valuable.

It may be what makes paying attention worthwhile.