Matter over mind

If we live long enough, most of us get to the point where we have no choice but to ruefully concede that our accomplished future self — the universally acclaimed manifestation of whom we had been hopefully anticipating all our lives, against all evidence — is never going to show up.

It was an idiotic fantasy all along. Once a nebbish, always a nebbish. No Nobel Peace Prize, no Order of Canada, no soup for you! And that’s not even the worst part. For it turns out there’s a corollary epiphany:

I always figured that my emotional states (from depression to joy) arose from external events, beyond my control, coupled with whatever I was thinking about at the time (from dumb to dumber). But as one slides into those pre-senility golden years, it becomes more and more evident that how one feels has much less to do with earnest cogitation on weighty matters than it does with the unconscious churn of hormones, sleep cycles and endorphins. Less on abstruse rumination than on basic nuts-and-bolts digestion.

There’s a famous quotation from Woody Allen: “I could see life as tragic or comic depending on my blood sugar level but always saw it as meaningless. I felt I was a tragedian locked in the body of a stand-up comic.”

Me, I don’t see life as meaningless (though it certainly has its moments), but Lloyd Christmas and I concur that Allen was bang-on about blood sugar levels affecting our moods and corresponding takes on how things stand in the world.

The ad agency that designed those cloying Snickers commercials also ripped the wrapper off a bombshell truth about being human: “You’re not you when you’re hungry.”

It makes me feel simultaneously dense and shallow to realize, only at this advanced age, that tweaking basic biological factors such as hours of sleep or time on an exercise bike can be the difference between being a decent human being and morphing into the Zodiac Killer.

When you think about it, maybe it’s a not such a bad thing that men in particular are more like simple Rube Goldberg machines (the mouth bone’s connected to the stomach bone, the stomach bone’s connected to the brain bone ... ) than the complicated conscious agents we pretend to be. It should make behavioural problems easier to fix.

But still. The humiliating implication is that you and I may have spent much of our lives trying to solve high-falutin’ problems that were actually nutritional.

All those years wasted on pondering existence, reading philosophy, examining the human condition, wondering why I am here and what it’s all about, Alfie — when the answer, on a surprising number of occasions, appears to have been: Have a banana, Cheetah.

This does put certain intellectual achievements in a different light.

Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”

You or me, at 4:15 in the afternoon after forgetting lunch: “I think my boss is an idiot, therefore I am having a mouthful of Smarties right now before I say something and get my ass fired.”

It also casts doubt on the supposed distinction between the mind and the body. We like to imagine that the mind is the refined part of us, the place where consciousness resides, while the body is the unfortunate animal we have to drag around.

But the body has a vote. A very large vote. Possibly a unionized vote.

You can spend an hour constructing an elegant argument about why you should forgive someone, accept uncertainty and move serenely into the next phase of your life. Then your blood sugar drops and suddenly you remember, with extraordinary clarity, something offensive this person said in 1997.

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You do not merely remember it. You prosecute it. You summon witnesses. You prepare exhibits. You begin drafting the closing argument. Meanwhile the supposedly superior mind is sitting there saying, “Perhaps we should let this go,” while the pancreas is screaming, “EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES!”

This may explain why human civilization has proceeded in such a peculiar fashion. We have created cathedrals, symphonies, constitutions, universities and nuclear weapons while determinedly remaining creatures who can become irrationally furious because somebody put an empty Cheerios box back in the pantry.

We congratulate ourselves on our capacity for reason, but reason has apparently been assigned the role of middle management. It makes recommendations. The hormones make decisions.

The hormones, like the high-IQ leader of the Free World who is DEFINITELY NOT A RUSSIAN ASSET, do not read the recommendations.

And so maybe growing older is partly a process of discovering that the self we imagined was in charge was never entirely in charge. There is no scheming homunculus sitting behind the eyes, hands folded thoughtfully, directing the organism according to a coherent master plan. No flustered old man shouting into a microphone when Toto pulls back the green curtain. No bogus wizard to pay no attention to.

There is instead a committee. The committee includes the brain, the gut, the endocrine system, several ancient evolutionary reflexes we share with crocodiles and armadillos, childhood memories nobody invited, and a mysterious department responsible for waking you at 4:13 in the morning to remind you of that broccoli floret stuck between your two front teeth at a dinner party in 1972.

The chairman has no idea what he is doing. This is understandable, because the committee is chaired by a half-digested egg salad sandwich. This might also be why wisdom, if it exists at all, seems less like acquiring profound knowledge than learning which members of the committee should not be allowed to speak (well, gurgle) after 10 p.m.

I once thought maturity meant becoming more certain about things. Now I suspect it means becoming more suspicious of certainty. Especially my own. (Of course, I could be wrong about that.)

When I am exhausted, I should not be trusted with metaphysics. When I am angry, I should not be trusted with email. When I am hungry, I should not be trusted to be around other people. When I am feeling inexplicably optimistic, I should perhaps be monitored for a possible neurological event. (Note to any future medical personnel standing at my bedside: Please discount the droopy face and uneven smile. I’ve cultivated them as part of my come-hither dynamism.)

And when I have had an excellent night’s sleep, eaten properly, exercised and gone outside into actual daylight, I become country singer-songwriter Ray Stevens in an “Everything is Beautiful” jag. Suddenly humanity seems forgivable. I see beauty everywhere. I feel compassion for strangers. I think perhaps I have finally achieved the spiritual maturity I had been expecting all these years.

Then some short-sighted codger slightly older than I am drives 20 kilometres an hour below the speed limit in front of me and an ancient reptile is suddenly lashing its spiked tail and gripping my steering wheel. There is none so blind as he who will not speed.

Maybe the real spiritual discipline is not transcending the animal but negotiating with it.

Admittedly, this is less glamorous than achieving enlightenment. The Buddha achieved Nirvana (the extinguishment of suffering) and Bodhi (awakening or wisdom). I am just hoping to achieve eight consecutive hours of sleep (awakening without having to get out of bed five times in the middle of the night to practise whizz-dom rituals).

But there might be something profound, I’ll grant you, in realizing how little separates our loftiest thoughts from our most primitive machinery. The same organism that can contemplate death can also become emotionally devastated because it has misplaced its reading glasses.

The same brain that understands the expansion of the universe can spend 20 minutes looking for the cellphone while talking on it. The same person who has spent a lifetime acquiring perspective can be reduced to Joe Pesci-level volatility by a growling stomach.

This is not a defect. This is simply what being human actually is.

We are animals that became clever enough to invent printing presses and microchips without becoming quite clever enough to stop electing obvious crooks and grifters. We put Mozart in the concert hall and Doritos in the cupboard. We write sonnets about mortality and then check the refrigerator six times in case something has mysteriously appeared. We build telescopes powerful enough to see galaxies billions of light-years away and remain unable to determine why we just walked into the kitchen.

Oh, look! Somebody left a bag of Spicy Nacho Doritos in the cupboard! Scooooooore!!!!!!!

And here’s the payoff: It means I can stop waiting for the grand version of myself to arrive. He is not en route and never will be. There is no final, improved model scheduled for delivery. No fully realized adult self is going to knock on the door one morning and say, “Sorry I’m late, Grasshopper. I have at last figured everything out. Here. Have a pebble.”

There is only this astonishingly jury-rigged contraption, making its way through time, alternately profound and ridiculous. And against all odds, it takes a licking and keeps on ticking.

If I am mostly a Rube Goldberg machine, then I have been given an unexpectedly pleasant assignment for the remaining years: keep the machine running, laugh when possible, sleep when necessary, eat before making profound pronouncements about religion or civilization, and try not to mistake a temporary chemical condition for a permanent truth.

For what is a man, what has he got? If not himself, then he has not. To say the words he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels. The record shows I took the rolls. And ate them … my way.