The Art is Long: Big Health and the New Warrior Activist

Of course, the modern world is often anti-ubuntu.

But on returning to the US, these soldiers were thrust into a world without a circle, without a shared sense of purpose. Instead of finding a community, they found indifference.

The same body-habitat alliance is still at work today. In a normal human setting, children and young adults are quick to form bonds with their habitat, a phenomenon we now call “place attachment.” The human nervous system, primed by a million years of evolution, readily soaks up the features of the natural world, mapping it to the brain and body. U

In Awe: The Delights and Dangers of Our Eleventh Emotion, neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall defines awe as an “overwhelming and bewildering sense of connection with a startling universe that is usually far beyond the narrow band of our consciousness.” And not surprisingly, this nature-inspired awe is also good for our health. A landmark study by Jenn

Ancient bodies and brains, modern culture, disruptive technologies, each pulling in different directions. The wheel is not only out of round, it’s also accelerating. This is a recipe for disaster.

even this thing we call “the environment” is really a kind of fiction. It’s a construct, a product of our language and culture. In the sense that it’s something apart from us, there is no “environment.” As Einstein would have put it, “the environment” is simply an optical delusion of our consciousness.

The same myopic, zoomed-in perspective now appears on the cover of every health magazine. The human body is presented as an individual object, living alone, isolated and abstracted from its life-supporting systems of habitat and tribe. No background, no context, no environment. From what we see on magazine covers, we might well come to the conclusi

She doesn’t get bogged down assigning responsibility. Her job is to exercise creative vigilance, always scanning her world for opportunities for play, humor, beauty, and art, even in the midst of “impossible” situations.

He does the difficult, risky work of social and cultural transformation: speaking in public, working with ideas, organizing, and persuading. Like the primal warrior, today’s warrior activist is willing to endure hardship and danger for the sake of the tribe.

Internal activism is essential, but the fact remains that there are external battles that must be fought. There are policies, organizations, and ideas that must be opposed.