Wishing you the constitution of a bat
“When the crowded Vietnamese refugee boats met with storms or pirates, if everyone panicked all would be lost. But if even one person on the boat remained calm and centered, it was enough. It showed the way for everyone to survive." — Thich Nhat Hanh
I recently finished writing a deeply researched magazine feature on the immune system.
And it's got me thinking about inflammation. It’s a process our bodies use to contain a threat, but left unchecked it has the potential to damage or even kill the body it means to protect. And I’m seeing it everywhere these days — in our bodies, in our discourse, in our collective psyche.
We need inflammation as part of a balanced and healthy immune response to protect against injury and infection, but it’s meant to be short-lived, quickly balanced out by other mechanisms that soothe and repair the damage the inflammation helped to contain.
When inflammation enters a feedback loop of increasing intensity and those calming mechanisms don’t kick in — as can happen in people with COVID-19 — the resulting cytokine storm can be fatal. The body starts destroying its own tissues, going up in an inflammatory inferno.
Bats are famous for being viral reservoirs. They carry hundreds of viruses, including close relatives of SARS-COV-2, as well as Ebola, rabies, Marburg, and MERS. But unlike humans, bats don’t seem to suffer any ill effects from them. Why?
The answer seems to have a lot to do with controlling inflammation. Bats’ immune systems take an approach of disease tolerance, in which they suppress the virus to manageable levels without worrying about destroying every last trace of it. They wind up flying around with dozens of viruses chilling in their bodies in an oogy little bat-shaped melting pot, effectively sporting “Coexist” bumper stickers on their butts.
What can we learn from our friends, the bats? Researchers are studying their immune systems for clues that can help modulate humans' immune response. But beyond that, on the level of mind and spirit, could we benefit from taking a more tolerant, bat-like approach to the dangers all around us — perceived and real?
More and more in our public discourse, inflammation of the spirit is framed as a virtue: “If you’re not pissed off, you’re not paying attention.” We try to one-up each other with how deeply outraged we feel. We send out inflammatory signals (sharing articles with alarmist headlines; framing mild interpersonal conflict in terms of violence or abuse) to keep angst raging in ourselves and others, stoking a feedback loop of increasing agitation. We continue even as we feel consumed, the mind damaging itself in its compulsion to defend and attack.
All over social media: dire predictions of the future; grim stories of suffering you’re powerless to prevent; accusatory tones that position the author as virtuous and the reader as morally bankrupt, with self-flagellation or impotent outrage the only available responses. The whole nuanced, complex world we share boiled down to competing teams, our adrenaline never allowed to rest.
Even when I don’t engage online, the voices still work their way inside my skull, and leave me arguing internally with avatars I construct.
But isn’t alarm the only sane response to our modern world? A pandemic raging out of control; blatant corruption enriching the ruthless few while millions scrape by; racial injustice; our democracy hanging by a thread; climate change accelerating. It can seem like the only sensible options are denial or despair.
But I feel the tug of a third option: taking calm, purposeful action in my sphere of influence, while nurturing resilience and wellbeing in myself and my community.
There’s a scene I think about a lot from Children of Men. Society is collapsing and humanity has lost nearly all hope of survival. Clive Owen takes the only pregnant lady in the world to see his old friend Jasper (Michael Caine), a political cartoonist turned pot dealer with connections to an underground organization called The Human Project. They have a relatively jovial evening — the only relaxed scene in the whole movie.
The next morning they wake up to realize the bad guys are on their way. Michael Caine gets Clive Owen and the pregnant lady into a car and tells them how to escape. He refuses to go with them, saying he’ll stay behind to divert the bad guys.
Then he walks calmly back inside and puts on “Ruby Tuesday” by the Rolling Stones while he waits for the bad guys to arrive. They show up and demand to know which way Clive Owen went. Michael Caine asks them to pull his finger. They won’t, so he pulls it himself, and he farts and laughs.
They shoot him, twice. Bleeding on the ground, he looks up at them again, reaches out a hand, and says...“Pull my finger.” And they shoot him again and kill him.
He never once loses his calm, his subversive humor, his gentle kindness. Not even in the face of terror, ambient and then suddenly acute. In the world of the movie, even more dystopian than this one, he’s like a bat living with a stew of viruses, refusing to help them destroy his equanimity with a spiritual cytokine storm.
It’s worth remembering: ER doctors have to stay calm. You can be righteous and calm. You can be a hero and stay chill. You can change and save lives with a twinkle in your eye.
Anxiety and outrage are not prerequisites for goodness (though they have become a tribal shorthand to signal to the world our allegiances). They’re natural, normal responses to dangers and disarray. But like inflammation, they serve their function best when they’re acute and short-lived — when they inspire action, and other mechanisms kick in to create an effective and balanced response. Once they become chronic, that’s a state of disease.
I say this because maybe you, like me, are hungry for permission to feel calm. Maybe you feel guilty when you look up and realize a few hours went by without a sense of dread and rage. Maybe you get feedback from others in your social circle that if you’re not constantly, actively stoking the fires of outrage, then you’re complicit or complacent. Maybe you’ve gotten so used to feeling inflamed that it’s become an addiction, a need you keep feeding, even as it consumes you psychically and physically.
This feels heretical to say, as if I’m suggesting that we shouldn’t struggle against oppression, or that we should deny our negative emotions. That’s not it. I’m just suggesting that we reconsider glorifying them. That we stop conflating angst with action, and try to put some intention in the direction of serenity. That we let our driving force be one of warmth, determination, and positive vision, and avoid the self-inflicted damage of inflammatory overreaction.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Spitfire Parade, one of a series of British children’s books by Capt. W.E. Johns, published in1941:
"When you are flying, everything is all right or it is not all right. If it is all right there is no need to worry. If it is not all right one of two things will happen. Either you will crash or you will not crash. If you do not crash there is no need to worry. If you do crash one of two things is certain. Either you will be injured or you will not be injured. If you are not injured there is no need to worry. If you are injured one of two things is certain. Either you will recover or you will not recover. If you recover there is no need to worry. If you don't recover you can't worry."
I’m wishing you all the constitution of a bat in the difficult, pregnant months ahead, as we coexist with stressors, threats, and possibilities both worrisome and wondrous. In the meantime, I’m sending anti-inflammatory signals of presence, peace, and calm.
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