Yoga is smart, and so is dog-walking.

What I did at 6 a.m. this morning, 30 minutes before my alarm went off, was stand up and do some chest-opening stretches. And I talked to myself a good bit. I’m probably better at channeling the wisdom of the cosmos at pre-dawn than I am at sunset, for sure.

I think what woke me up was a combination of inferior digestion, new-forming-scar pain, and the usual sort of stressy, nondescript ouchiness that hovers in my upper torso and is best released by doing something. Like stretches.

I would posit that a good percentage of even avowed atheists are not materialists, to the extent that they would never bother tapping into the under/over/through-current of intelligence that seems to pulse through the quantum soup. (If you’ve ever effed it...I mean, it is ineffable after all.)

I am not placing myself among atheists by so positing, but I do find that by default I am somewhat of an a-theist. That is, assuming you take theism to require a discrete other, usually at least partially definable by the guidelines offered in a particular religion. So, it is possible that by not being able to identify a discrete presence as opposed to a generalized connectivity, one is a-theistic.

I sort of agree with the theory that one of the reasons we humans got so heavily invested in religion is that, as critters go, we got a little more intelligent than is good for a fragile psyche. While cats indubitably cast themselves as the point-of-view character in their experience of life, they probably don’t wonder what happens when the story ends.

I’m not sure the concept of mortality is a healthy thing to meta-analyze. By which I mean this: While most of us objectively recognize that we will, in fact, die, it’s comforting to hold oneself as the sort of person [that]* doesn’t happen to, until the time it actually happens. *[neurodegeneration, skin cancer, any cancer, traumatic bone-crushing injuries, etc.]

I do know for certain, and can vouch for this by dint of much personal experience, that doing something (stretches, bricklaying, walking, composing readerless books,) is a vastly more therapeutic coping strategy than lying in bed at 6 a.m. noticing how it can be painful to somaticize your existential uncertainty.