What It Means To Be Present in the Good Old Flesh: A Body Worthy of Reclamation

At the end of 2019, I watched from the isolated and affected shores of West Africa the rapid unfolding of the danger that terrified the world and everything of it. I had heard the word pandemic before; it was during one of my boring lectures where my professor felt the urgency to explain this word and the terror it ensued. But at the time, what escaped my imagination was the capability of a three-syllabic word — pan-dem-ic — to shrink our intimacy with our surroundings and inevitably, reshape the borders of our earth once it left its page. Economies crashed, migration stopped, and nature became the mother whose arms we felt haunted(how could we not?) to feel still within. We bore witness to humanity teetering between crumbling and survival. Still, as hope insists, we must survive, even if we lose touch with ourselves and reckon with our existence anew — nothing about survival feels the same.

We relearned to breathe, slow and steady. A breath too heavy possessed an unimaginable capacity to sustain our wakefulness or give our bodies permission to be vanquished in the dire moment of our hope for living. Who would have thought that the air, a saturation and palpable reminder of what it means to be alive, could exhibit an innate duality of joy and chaos? Our lexicon, restricted and altered, to fit the battleground needs of our existence. Unprecedented. Social Distancing. Prevention. New Normal. Our vast language disassembled and repurposed to shift the ground beneath our feet, often fighting at two frontiers: to simply survive a word powerful enough to leave its page, and hold on to the faint-old memory of who we were — a social species capable of presence, even if only briefly — before becoming who we are.

What happens to people who are only able to celebrate themselves through their history, which, in all fairness, is inextricably linked to their bodies? Which is to say: the pandemic did not just redefine our existence; it forced our lives to be in parallel with the occurrence of time, but froze our bodies, depriving us of the experience of what it means to be present and alive in the moment simultaneously. The pandemic may be over (or at least mitigated) in the visible world. Still, its effects are a working machine within us. And our bodies are yet to acknowledge this due to the tremendous loss, grief, and longing we’ve encountered. Connection, social interactions, physical touch, and community—the very aspects of our lives that make us human and capable of love, that make us a nest to nurture each other—are the same aspects that endangered us. And because adaptation is one of the good old tricks of our beautiful nervous system, our bodies have become internally replenished with social isolation — a mechanism brutal enough to disrupt our belonging to one another, and by extension, disconnect us from ourselves.

A few weeks ago, I listened to a podcast featuring the British essayist, author, and philosopher Pico Iyer, where he discussed his encounters with people around the world and the idea they have held within the walls of their chest: time goes by really fast, and a part of their lives feels disconnected from it. Pico has spent over 30 years of his life traveling with the Dalai Lama; he has moved through the world as much as it has moved through him, and in his words, “In the age of speed, nothing is more important than going slow.” When I start to process the concept of slowing down across various phases of my life, I realize it is a relationship that requires both the connection of the mind and body. The very essence of slowing down is to heighten our sense of the body; to feel the world moving through us, through the fullness of our being, and deep within the marrow of our bones. Now that our bodies have been disconnected by the phrase neuroscientists and psychologists refer to as our instinctive freeze response(even though I wonder how a response, especially one from a vessel of feelings, can be frozen), our minds have enabled us to become architects of tremendous growth who are alarmingly disembodied.

We are in a constant loop: dealing with the quarter-century crisis, the persistent pressure of wanting more, the fast-paced need for success, and the overwhelming thought of our lives becoming emergency rooms until we’ve lost agency over the very architecture through which we are enabled to navigate the symmetries of life: our bodies. New normal — a stressor and impediment to our reclamation has obviated what I’d call the body’s seemingly ordinary but ideal encounters with people, places, and most importantly, itself. We are shaped by the conditions in which we are present most, and to be present is to give our bodies the ultimate freedom to be a witness to love, care, and the beauties of the world.

The body is our sanctuary for connection, for longing, and the constant reminder of feeling alive. Unlike the buzzing screen that displays a replica of us, which is, of course, an unvalidated reduction of who we are, it gives us the power to see and be seen. Our eyes are at equidistance with each other; this is to say, it is only when the body is within reach, only when it is palpable, that we are capable of LOOKING at the whole. We revel in the sacred moments that language alone is incapable of conveying, words uplifted from its page(words powerful than pandemic) and translated in our lives through laughter spilling over a shared meal, hope found in sharing the last bar of chocolate, the quiet cadence of our footprints on the beach, the soul-soft hush of being wrapped in someone else’s arm or tapped on the shoulders by a colleague who says “what a time to be alive”— these are the impeccable experiences that ignite our familiarity to each other.

In a world where we are challenged with more uncertainties and pandemics hammered into the permanence of the lives we live, where our nervous system itself is against interpretation, and societies are as terrified and haunted by the elaborate rippling we are yet to experience, the body remains our epicenter. It is our sanity, our hope. The haven through which the borders of our lives, nature, and the lives of others intersect. And to protect this haven, which is, in fact, our epoch of belonging, we must call ourselves to slow down, feel the weight of our own footsteps, and reclaim the simple, profound act of being here, together, in the good old flesh.