Physically Dying
When Bob Dylan growled out the line, “he not busy being born is busy dying,” in a song titled, ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),’ he got a lot of people thinking, including me.
But he was misleading.
Dying isn’t anything like Living and we’re not busy at it or we’d by goners very quickly.
Dying isn’t an extreme version of Living. It’s a different physiological state.
Life is an ongoing balancing act on many fronts, falling out of optimal functioning, then addressing and restoring. It’s dynamic — events which promote illness happen all the time, and we meet them head on, consciously or not, with biochemistry and behavior.
The best we can realistically expect is some tilt toward the healthy side of the continuum, or maybe a stand-off between the powerful, increasing tendencies built into our systems and the constraining ones that hold them in check.
Homeostasis.
Dying is when there’s no more balance, no more dynamic, no more back and forth from relatively sick to relatively healthy.
Dying is so different we will not grasp what is happening to us if we see it as more…
