I’ve found the fountain of youth (again). Plenty have found it before me. When everything about our existence seems most bleak, there is somehow a way to find joy in it all. The magical combination isn’t magic at all. It’s biology.
The world could be buring down all around me, but if I’m cycling, swimming, doing yoga, going outside, and eating nutrient-dense foods I am still full of joy. This is the same recipie humans as historical as Leo Tolstoy have been following forever.
Why does it work? I suppose it is because it gets us closer to remembering that we are just another animal on this Earth than anything else.
Cycling gives us a clear view of our world, we see a lot of it all at once, much more than just hiking or walking, which are also very good.
Yoga causes us to look inward and identify our connection to everything, to control the fluctuations of the mind that have been coded into us from millions of years of paranoia and fearful imagination of what predator might be behind that bush trying to kill us, to tame our “monkey mind.”
The human animal cannot escape fear. It is deeply rooted in our evolutionary biology where it once kept us alive. Now it distracts us and leads to suffering when unchecked (as Yoda says). We may be on the top of the food chain now, but it will take millions of years to undo our natural state of fear, paranoia, and evolutionary resentment of all other species who were stronger than us. It’s made us not only fearful, but full of unchecked pride and a lust for power and dominion. We crave it in our very genetics. The less evolved will constantly act on these impulses (as human history has proven time and again). Perhaps if we survive, we will one day evolve away from these genetically codified behaviors, but probably not. The less evolved would rather destroy the entire species than acknowledge the need for balance with the Earth that gave them life. They are too stupid to realize at any level that their genetic code will not live on if the entire species collapses. But Mother Earth will correct. She always does.
Swimming creates a direct connection with the flow of the Universe that is sensory and scientifically proven to produce better mental health simply from the contact we have with the water, even moreso when we swim safely in open water.
Eating nutrient-dense foods means eating foods that are closer to their natural state, less processed, and more like what out evolutionary ancestors learned to process.
And going outside for any amount of time and seeing and feeling the natural world triggers something deep and primal that reinforces that we are still members of the animal kingdom, we are a part of the natural system, not apart, not dominant over it, not “children of God” but “childen of Mother Earth” just like every other creature in the universal biome all around us. When we forget that, Mother Earth is quick (on a scale of millions of years) to correct the balance. There’s no need to fear death, because everything that makes up our bodies will continue on, forever. We are composed of matter that belonged to potentially millions of other living creatures before our own bodies. We are, by our very physical nature, practically eternal.