Physicalness & Risking: The thirteenth window of experience

The thirteenth window is physicalness or risking.  Humans too readily forget that their bodies speak loudly to their close and ongoing relationship to their evolutionary past. We are still animals, and, in certain ways, still closely connected to the plants.  We must not forget that we are a part of all living things.  Animals and plants do not destroy their bodies.  They take risks to live, but they do not undo themselves for unnatural reasons. Humans do, particularly in their self-diminishment.  Animals and plants do not pity themselves in their ecological survival struggles.  Humans do.  Animals and plants seldom appear to be plagued with problems of self-destructiveness.  Humans are.

Animals and plants seldom forgo the important part that taking risks plays in their continuing being.  They dare to try, to evolve.  We can come to know this through unending attentiveness to the physical--to the animal and plant world and to our own bodies and souls.  To stay alive we have to experience the beautiful exhilaration of being, experiencing ourselves in our physicalness--when we just walk, much less dance.  To repress or forgo that exhilaration is to jeopardize our self-being.

Taken from The Windows of Experience by Malone and Malone