Head Strong?

Last semester, my health wasn’t great for quite a while. It wasn't that I was sore anywhere in particular, or that I had a fever. Rather, I was in a constant state of having not enough energy, like I had some lurking virus that just refused to come out. I topped up with vitamins and minerals, I got plenty of sleep, and I did all sorts of healthy things, but my exhausted body kept on not recovering.

Thinking about it now, my body was crying out “we’re doing too much!” Our bodies, in their wisdom, try to protect us and send out various signals to keep us from hitting a wall.  In response, our mind pushes the things we should do, the things we have to do – “You can’t be saying all this! This is our job!”

          Even if it’s impossible, you have to do it

          Take a pill and push through it

          You can take a break once you've finished, ok?

This time, it wasn’t just my body. I also had internal conflicts.

         

“I can’t give proper guidance like this”

           “I want to give my students more attention, but…”

It’s a far from ideal cycle of compromise, followed by more compromise.

The voice of reason in our head even tries to soothe our despair and indignation – “There’s nothing you can do about it, it’s the way of the times”. 

Our heads deny the voice of our body and its wisdom, and the cries of our child-like spirit.

At what point did our head get into such an estimable position?

Even though our body and our heart are just as important as our head, no-one told me that. Or that the body, heart and mind are connected and if they fall out of synch then you run into trouble. Even at school, “studying” was distinct from “exercise”, and “physical education” was separate from “moral education”. Even when you were rubbish at exercise, you got into a good school, and moral education didn’t seem to be a factor.

Education for the purpose of developing one’s brain overwhelmingly took primacy. So, “a child with a good head” would climb step by step up the stairs to “success”, but no merit was given to being a kid who was healthy or kind-heated. It’s because of this kind of education that society is so “head strong”.

A myth has developed that “the man of superior intellect is the highest of men”, and it’s people with out of balance personalities who run companies, who become university lecturers, who come into positions of governing countries… But a leader, in the true sense, is a person who has achieved balance between the heart, the mind and the body. If we are to get this balance back, we have to stop singularly elevating the mind and reason, yeah? It’s fine for someone who happens to have a superior intellect to look into ways of exercising it well, but there’s no need to emphasise it beyond that.

Instead, it would be great to learn, from a young age, how to take proper care of your own body. Like what exercise and food works for you (it won’t be the same for any two people). Like looking into the shades of meaning in the signals your body sends you. Like having discussions about the physical changes of puberty.

Then, it would be great to deepen our emotional learning further and further. To share, listen to, and acknowledge the whole range of each other’s feelings. If we could simply speak our true feelings, and have someone who will listen to them, instead of them labelling them as “wrong”, that would probably be a complete life 180.

And it would be great to take time to meditate and practice opening our ears to the voice in our hearts. Please, moderate book learning and make this kind of time. And, it would be great if we could train up teachers who can teach these kinds of things.

Nowadays, there are teacher training courses in the summer holidays and, even though it’s a huge ask, instead of lectures on our specialised subjects, we really should be doing more and more with trying to get involved in how we can advance physical and emotional learning.

Let’s stop weirdly worshipping “people with good heads” and get on with reworking our head-strong society. And with giving our sincere thanks to our body, our heart, and our mind, that work tirelessly for us. Obtaining balance is genuinely difficult, but, every day, I’m working on it.

[You can find the original post 「頭でっかち」 in Japanese here.]