smart living • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Project

	smart living being given to enactive fulfillment gary e. davis	December 18, 2024

Exhale, inhale—outer worldness (“extraverional”), inner worldness (“intro-
versional”); casual, alien; [inter]personal presence, one self.

The analogy’s cute, maybe (isomorphic: def. 1 a). But life originated by formation of liminal difference: bubbles of permeable wall (networking lipids) which allowed differentiation of inner process from outer process (interal identity-in-difference).

A sentient fetus becomes involved with self-enhancive interest pre-natally such that birth is merely a bad day on its given, yet its own, path over future months, belonging in self-differentation with belonging in engulfed presence “innately”
via fascination, curiosity, and exploratory fearlessness that may drive a parent nuts—unless that unguided natural growth is given concerted cultivation
(part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and generally more on better parenting).

But years later, ordinary life—sociocentric life (mainly “validated by similar others’” approval)—can be a long-lived forgetting of one’s love of being. Some-
how, a dim sense of thriving becomes normal. Life too commonly becomes
a matter of staying alive (or thinking “maybe not,” i.e., self-destructiveness,
bad living).

A loved one can say “live smartly, don’t be stupid,” because that’s an expression
of true caring.

I could say that to my two brothers, born as smart as me. But they lived stupidly, died young.

How could my close friend for decades, an experienced psychotherapist, kill herself in mid-life? She leaves a note avowing she knows she’s loved, but she doesn’t reach out.

Another friend, dearly loved, a professor of Literature, mid-semester of winter, drives to a bridge and jumps into the icy river. She didn’t reach out. Stupid!

An obese person, a couch potato, claims he doesn’t need health insurance, barely survives a heart attack, then becomes a self-righeous evangelist for healthy living. Lucky him.

Unlucky: a doctor of medicine who surrendered his/her youth to gain excellence of care, only to be overwhelmed by stupid lives expecting to be repaired at great expense. Then, they whine about the financial cost—notwithstanding that the health insurance business is an obscene racket. But, still…

Some of the stupidity is vastly powerful: warrior autocrats, predatory marketers, celebrity parasites of their sycophants who hawk bad information, and masses of clueless voters who believe in heroic magic.

Inhale, exhale,…deeply. Deep breathing is good for reducing stress.

Intelligent life isn’t natural, like leaves of grass turning to the sun. We work at it,
of course (in due course, in good time, pathing, venturing): enough:

• healthy diet
• regular exercise
• sleep
• belonging
• caring for mental health (especially smart stress management)

But the resultant satisfactions can be worth the work. We gain a thereby given level of thriving via long-sighted enaction which can be fulfilling, thus drawing smart (well chosen) life into more appealing cycles of belonging to given enactive fulfilling.

I put it that way because intelligence as such is a deliberateness of engagement which biology doesn’t express. (Oh, you think intelligence is biological?—though neuroscience can’t understand emergent mentality as such: making distinctions, preferring, enacting). Intelligent selection is beyond natural selection.

And only human capability to choose can secure futures for distant generations.

We’re the species which scales dimensions. Ever grander (higher, farther, deeper, better) circularity of generatively interplaying appreciations. Caring for and about one’s life smartly, intimacies, friendships, and solidarities smartly—personal, cultural, social, and even conceputal appreciations smartly—is how life gains exemplarity, so a life may affect new generations in the unfathomable relays of Our evolving.

Good* reason to live.