Recalled to Life

I picked up A Tale of Two Cities on a whim last month — one of those books you always meant to read but never quite got to. Early on, there’s a passage in which a man is asked how long he has been buried. “Almost eighteen years,” comes the reply. He is not literally underground. He has been imprisoned, kept from sunlight and language and human touch for so long that he has become a kind of ghost occupying his own body. When asked whether he hopes to live, he cannot answer. The question no longer makes sense to him.

I think about that exchange more than I probably should.

The quiet burial

Most men I know are not in crisis. They are employed. They are partnered. They show up to the things they’re supposed to show up to. And somewhere along the way, without anyone noticing — least of all themselves — they stopped being present for any of it.

This is not depression, exactly, though it can shade into it. It’s something more ambient than that. A slow withdrawal of attention from your own life. You eat without tasting. You sit with your kids but you’re elsewhere. Your body is a thing you transport from room to room, and it has been months, maybe years, since you asked it how it felt.

Dickens understood this. His buried man doesn’t know he’s buried. He has adapted so completely to the dark that light is the foreign thing. The cell has become indistinguishable from the self.

How it happens

The mechanism is not mysterious. You get busy. You get responsible. You develop a set of competencies that the world rewards — discipline, endurance, suppression of complaint — and you optimize around them until they become a personality. Somewhere in your thirties, the question shifts from what do I want to what is required of me, and the first question stops getting asked at all.

Your shoulders migrate toward your ears. Your breath gets shallow. You carry tension in your jaw and your hips and your lower back, and it’s been there so long you’ve mistaken it for structure, the way a tree grows around a fence post until they seem like one thing.

This is not a failing of character. It’s an adaptation. You did what you had to do. But adaptations have costs, and the cost of this one is that you wake up one morning and realize you can’t remember the last time you felt genuinely alive in your body.

The problem with breakthroughs

Our culture loves a transformation narrative. The man who hits bottom, finds a practice, changes everything. The before-and-after. The pivot.

It almost never works that way. What actually happens is smaller and less satisfying to describe. You take a class, or you stretch on the floor of your living room for ten minutes, and you notice — perhaps for the first time in years — that your hamstrings are furious. That your hips are locked. That when you breathe deeply, something in your chest wants to crack open, and you don’t quite know what’s on the other side.

You do this again the next day, and the day after that. Nothing revelatory happens. Your back hurts a bit less. You sleep slightly better. You catch yourself, one afternoon, actually tasting your coffee instead of just consuming it. These are not the kinds of changes that make for a good podcast episode. They are, nevertheless, the real ones.

Why the body comes first

I spent years trying to think my way into feeling better. Reading books, building frameworks, journaling with great intensity about states of mind I wanted to achieve. It was all useful, in its way, and none of it was sufficient.

What I was missing — what I think a lot of men miss — is that the body is not downstream of the mind. It is the mind, or at least a much larger part of it than we were taught. You cannot think your way out of tension you refuse to feel. You cannot intellectualize your way back to presence. At some point, you have to get on the floor and find out what your body has been holding while you were busy being competent.

This is uncomfortable. It is sometimes embarrassing. There is nothing dignified about a grown man discovering he cannot touch his toes, or that a simple hip opener makes him inexplicably emotional. But dignity was part of the problem. You were so busy being composed that you forgot to be alive.

Recalled

Dickens called the first section of his novel “Recalled to Life.” The phrase is delivered as a cryptic message, passed between strangers on a dark road. Nobody quite understands what it means. The messenger, muttering to himself and his horse, thinks it sounds like a terrible idea.

I find this very funny, and very true. Being recalled to life is a terrible idea, in the sense that it is disruptive and inconvenient and asks you to feel things you had successfully filed away. It’s much easier to stay in the cell. The cell is predictable. You know its dimensions.

But the alternative is another eighteen years of answering “I can’t say” when someone asks whether you care to live.

So you start. Not with a transformation, not with a breakthrough, but with ten minutes on the floor and a willingness to be bad at something. You breathe. You move. You notice what you notice. And very slowly — so slowly it barely registers — you begin to come back.