Listen to Your DNA
Go back to the basics to build well-being
During our morning husband-and-wife walk, Andrea was telling me about his weekend visit to a friend’s man cave, to see a car being restored by an acquaintance of a good friend. As a designer, naturally, Andrea’s first observations were what could have been done differently to make the car a standout, make it sing; I think he redesigned it several times over in his mind…just for the fun of it.
Eventually, we segued into a deeper discussion about how much he likes to go out to the garage at night. All by himself. Among all the tools (old, restored, inherited, newly found, and new)… amidst the ongoing handful of projects in different stages of completion… surrounded by the cabinets and workstations he designed and built… surveying the very orderly stacks of wood and materials… gazing with contentment at the memorabilia he’s collected over the years that adorn the slivers of available wall space. He finds great consolation in the center of his happy place, as he likes to say.
In part, he enjoys the solitude of working through projects in his mind—as an artist and designer, he can see things while staring off into space. (I get this as I share this odd facility as well.) But I’m convinced that the other aspect of why his workshop is so special to him is much more primal. It’s innate. It’s where he builds. He fixes broken things. He creates useful items. He is self-reliant and able to stand on solid ground in a constantly shifting world.
Andrea, like the rest of us, is a product of evolution from the past hundreds of thousands of years. Genetics that evolved gradually over millennia and are now expected to change and adapt in a relative nano-second. I believe deep in my bones that many of people’s current ills—ranging from overall physical health to emotional and mental well-being—can be traced back to the fact that throughout our daily lives, we are simply going against our natural grain. In almost every regard. You name it. Nearly everything about our lives is vastly different from eons of evolution ingrained in our DNA.
For the better?
It’s so profoundly ironic that all the tools and products meant to facilitate and improve our daily lives have instead made them exponentially more complicated. I was just lamenting this with Andrea while troubleshooting a wi-fi that required continual rebooting and confessing to our tech guy that I didn’t know our router from our modem. When I was a child, my dad knew how to pull the dryer out and clean it, change the tubes in the TV, and service the oil and fan belt in the car. Bada bing bada boom. We were good to go.
I understand that I may sound like an old fuddy-duddy, but truthfully it was a simpler, more straightforward time. These days, we’ve had to become pseudo-experts in subjects we have no clue about (or become beholden to experts, like our tech guy), remember logins and passwords no mere mortal can recall without assistance from a computer-generated forgot-my-password, and retrain ourselves to master what used to be simple operations like our car radio turned media center.
Our food crops have been scientifically engineered to withstand torrential weather, grow bigger, and look perfect. Processed food has been created under the guise of convenience to be overly satiating and appealing...and addicting. Unfortunately, our bodies have not evolved to assimilate or utilize all of the foreign chemicals and compositions that are required to produce such “perfection.” Even how we get our daily food is 180 degrees different from 100 short years ago.
We sit way too much and move way too little. It’s fascinating: we seat our bodies in totally unnatural positions for most of the day and then buy an endless litany of products to counteract this abnormal slump, whilst remaining in a chair. Recently, I was in a meeting with a group of people when a seemingly healthy young woman in her thirties wheeled in her special, very expensive chair, with an added “orthopedic” seat cushion and back lumbar support cushion. Nuts.
Our lives are impacted by unnatural physical and mental micro-stressors throughout the day and I would argue, we are not better for them.
Balance with basics
Our minds are overloaded, our bodies are underused, and we are consuming and breathing toxins at every step and turn. Yet, it seems to be such a mystery why the trends of chronic illness are on the rise. Mental illness has a grip on a larger segment of the population than ever before. And, I’m sad to report, that life expectancy is down 2.8 years—a reverse of an upward trend since the mid-nineties.
Here is what I know to be true: the farther away we get from nature and evolution, the worse off we become. In all aspects of life. My solution is to go back to basics wherever and whenever possible, no matter how small and insignificant it may seem. While I’m in no position to chuck it all and become a homesteader or live like the Amish, there are tiny steps I take to counterbalance the world I’m submerged in.
I listen closely to what my DNA is positively responding to...which means I’m mostly zigging while the culture is zagging. I feel better the more that I move and the heavier weights that I lift. I eat simple, clean food…for instance, my breakfast is typically sprouted nuts and eggs, and I have not had a french fry in well over a year. (Interestingly, I’m not tempted anymore.) I’m a fairly simple, minimal dresser…some may call it boring, but I regard it as unfussy and classic.
I have a feeling of renewal from morning walks, which help me sleep better and center my focus for the first half of the day. Andrea likes soft jazz or classical music so that is usually in the background while we work during the day. The phone is put face down at about 7:30 at night on the entry table. We don’t have network TV in the house, and we limit watching movies during the week.
I’m also finding that I much prefer very dimmed lights in the evening as I wind down. Andrea thinks I’m looney to wash my face in the dark, but it dawned on me that it’s another evolutionary trait. Up until the early 1920s, most homes were lit by muted candlelight and gas lamps; and before the nineteenth century, it was solely candlelight. Relatively speaking, mimicking the sun in the dead of night is very new to our evolution, and I think our circadian rhythms are none too happy about that.
Similarly, Andrea has been cultivating this invaluable balance by spending time in his happy place, working with his hands, building useful items, running on trails, and tackling big mountains. Likewise, our son alerts us to beautiful sunsets and texts pictures of ethereal cloud formations. My family is a reminder it’s never too early nor too late to foster good habits that tap into our DNA to live well, age great.