Being a Body
Sweet Bites for November 1, 2024
Hi all,
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.
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🍰 Mini Bite - Reflections on Life
This week’s mini bite is from the neurologist Oliver Sacks’ final work, Gratitude, which documents Sack’s final thoughts and reflections on life as he struggled with the late stages of cancer.
“Eighty! I can hardly believe it. I often feel life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.”
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“At eighty, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age.”
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“I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.”
📚 This Week’s Monday Meditation
✏️ This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom
📰 Article Worthy of a Read
When grief doesn’t end by Martin W Angler
📖 Book Recommendation
Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and The Origins of the Human Mind by Ajit Varki and Danny Brower
One of my favorite books of the last few years.
Highlights:
“Although natural selection acts on individuals, it eventually shapes populations of organisms, which are made up of a collection of traits encoded in genes.”
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“Females are genetically primed by evolution to unconsciously "choose" mates offering the best genes for their progeny, and they often use status in the group as an important indicator of this genetic prowess. One might also expect that being smarter should have a greater benefit if an animal is relatively long-lived, giving it more time to maximize the use of such abilities.”
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“That even an animal with complete self-awareness cannot truly understand death until it becomes fully aware that others of its kind are also self-aware individuals in other words, until it becomes aware of the personhood of others. This higher level of awareness is called a "full theory of mind," or the ability to fully "attribute mental states" to others, and with it comes an awareness of the deaths of others and thus the realization of one's own mortality… the only way for a species to get past this death-anxiety barrier is by denial of this reality.”
I’d suggest pairing this with The Denial of Death.
😂 Some Laughter
In the below scene of Seinfeld, George Costanza showcases his neuroticism on death.
🦉 Wisdom
“Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of "life" when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe… It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body.”
Christopher Hitchens
Source: Mortality
🏋🏻 Exercise
In Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, he references a term called meditatio mortis which translates roughly to “rehearsal for death.”
While many focus on memento mori, the acknowledgment of death, and premeditatio malorum, to plan for what can occur, we seldom focus on meditatio mortis which is perhaps the most important of the three.
One must prepare themselves for death, Seneca says. It is only through this preparation that we can take back some control over its existence. There is no fighting it, but there is accepting it by anticipating it and reflecting upon it.
The author Robert Greene often references this rehearsal through a visualization exercise.
Imagine it’s your final moments on earth. Think about what you’d like to see, reflect upon who or what would be there, where you are and what you’re doing. Now visualize the final moments as they slip by and imagine the world you are leaving, imagine what will be left behind with your departure.
Reflecting upon death starts to take away the fear and gets us comfortable with first acknowledging, and then accepting, the terms of life.
Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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