Bet On The Body This Lent
"The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind." -GK Chesterton
I’ve been sick the last few days. Nothing major, just fighting a typical winter cold, but one thing is a little bit different:
My brain is exhausted.
You may have seen the HBR AI study, the agent orchestration frameworks, the OpenClaw fervor. Actually doing it is exhausting. Token expenditure may be disembodied intelligence, but this is still cognitive territory controlled by someone. When the borders of that territory expand without limit, the brain gives out.
So I’ve been trying to lay off. I hit the gym today after a few days off and it felt divine. But halfway through my kettlebell work I was already eager about a new idea. I wanted to write it down, make it real, dictate a design so an agent could implement. And I had to channel my inner Kurt Vonnegut. Becoming is about us, not about ideas. They don’t all have to become real.
And yet that’s exactly what these tools compel. More than anything, they are agency amplifiers. They give our will superpowers and it sounds as enticing as a hallucinogenic drug until you get the cravings that come with it.
For the first time in my life, it’s easy to feel constantly and easily overwhelmed by context. I can’t keep up with multiple, tireless agents and different contexts and different projects all racing ahead. Not reading the code isn’t laziness, it’s sheer impossibility, and so we build new scaffolding and new abstractions to manage the load another layer up. The mind stretches to cover more territory and more load until it has nothing left.
So I admit defeat.
Fortunately, Lent starts today.
Lent is about preparing ourselves for the celebration of Easter and the truth of the Resurrection. A truth that is, while profoundly intellectual and philosophically rigorous, about the Body. During Lent, we prepare ourselves by fasting and sacrificing. Pope Leo says that “fasting not only permits us to govern our desire, purifying it and making it freer, but also to expand it, so that it is directed towards God and doing good.”
We are meant for more. And the sacrifice of fasting is meant to help us expand our desire to find more.
So bet on the Body this Lent. While the world expends its energy on more tokens and disembodied intelligence, remind yourself and others of your humanity by focusing on your body. This is not mindless work; it takes tremendous focus of mind and will to deny the easy fulfillment we all have available in our 21st century world. Build up your body, as a temple to God. Make it powerful. Make it healthy. Don’t let vanity or other concerns prevent you from making it beautiful and fearsome.
“God had infinite options for self-disclosure and chose the one that involved diapers and puberty and sex and death.”
God didn’t simply save a mind. He raised a Body.
Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?
Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacles. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.
—Kurt Vonnegut
