If you change only one thing in your daily routine to gain better physical and mental health, what should it be? The Barefoot Traveller finds out.
First thing in the morning, I sit on a beach chair in my backyard and look up. It’s a new skill, so I don’t always get it right. I try to do it around sunrise.
I watch to see if the sky will change colour, perchance to see a hadeda fly past. It’s almost a habit now, a lifestyle choice, like doing exercise.
Its purpose is not to see the hadedas but to be conscious of them and how they fit into the scene that I see, feel, and experience around me. It is darker now when I go out. The grass is slightly colder, and the birds whose names I don’t know chirp vaguely differently.
The hadedas are the same: some days I don’t see them at all, some days they screech in the distance and, very rarely, only once so far, a feather floats to the grass in front of me as they make a noisy fly-over.
I am cautious not to call this process ‘mindfulness’ as the word suggests pressure for it to mean anything. One might try too hard to attach a sense of achievement to it. It is closer to something they tried to teach us at Veldskool: ‘Bewuswording.’ You had to go out in the morning and merely be ‘aware.’ That’s all. ‘Let net fokken op, asseblief.’ I didn’t understand it then, but I do now: Reverence is irrelevant. Just pay attention.
The apparent purposelessness of this morning behaviour is part of its value. It is not a failure when there are no hadedas, nor a win if there are. I focus on the bird because it comforts me to have some structure in the nothingness, as I am used to chaos at this time of day. The aim is to allow the sky in, 1 000 lux at a time.
It’s neuroscience. The moment light hits your retina after sleep, it stimulates your suprachiasmatic nucleus and triggers a chemical chain of events that sets up your whole day and the next night’s sleep. It kickstarts your dopamine and serotonin, which regulate your mood. It orders your cortisol and epinephrine, which define your stress levels. It influences your weight, digestion, immune system, cognitive function, motor skills and even gene expression.
‘If there is only one thing you can change about your health, do this – get good light in the first hour after you wake up,’ explains Andrew Huberman, a tenured professor at the Department of neurobiology at Stanford.
Light-mediated activation
Much of his work focuses on the visual system, including the mechanisms controlling light-mediated activation of the brain’s circadian and autonomic arousal centres. Not all light is the same, though. Sunlight is superior to artificial light. It is better if you can get it directly into your eyes and not through a window. Light at a low solar angle is preferable to overhead light, which is why you should consume your Lumen before 09h00. The first prize is to do it while you are walking, as the side to side movement of the head adds additional brainpower. Do it for at least two to ten minutes. Those are the rules.
Thus I sit like a lizard on a rock and wait for the drugs to kick in.
I perform this ritual with sturdy coffee and hadedas, but you can do it while having a smoke break. (The nicotine adds a dopamine hit.)
Since the dawn of man, the sun has been the ‘on’ switch for the soft robot we call homo sapiens. We have a restart button at the beginning of each 24 hours and a collection of chemicals to carry us through it.
Two million years ago, Mrs Ples arose at daybreak, hungry and cold, instinctively alert for another day of foraging for leaves, fruits, nuts and eggs. She might have heard the cry of a type of ibis, which had been evolving for more than 50 million years by then, but I doubt she would have cursed the creature’s existence or made it part of a health commitment. She had more pressing risks to worry about, like becoming prey to a hyena or a leopard and starving to death in the event of surviving a direct attack.
David Livingstone recorded their sighting in 1857 in the upper and lower Zambezi valleys. As a naturalist, he referred to them as Bostrychia hagedash, not ‘flying vuvuzelas’. These southern ibis are iterations of the sacred ibis, revered by the Egyptians for more than 5 000 years. Livingstone would have known this and might have appreciated how their peace-piercing calls competed with the thundering smoke of the Victoria Falls.
Right now, in the Black Sea area, a cousin of the hadeda, the glossy ibis might wake some sleeping soldier to another day of horror. It might be their last, as any day might be ours. It does not matter whether the soldier wields a Javelin or Kalibr missile; their adrenaline levels will be the same as will be their pledge to their families. The ibis there don’t screech and caw; they have a gentler, grunting, croaking sound. All the better to hear the sounds of war, my dear.
A perfect concoction
I can’t relate to the natural high Livingstone must have felt each day. A perfect concoction of compounds, hormones, and amino acids that man manifested, filled with adventure, exploration, and spiritual fulfilment. Nor can I comprehend a state where only cortisol and terror exist without oxytocin’s comfort. Caffeine has to be good enough for me. Not yet fully awake, I sit and become aware of how the espresso nudges the melatonin and tryptophan out of me into a state of bewuswording. I let in the light.
It does not compare with the discovery of the source of the Nile, but I can share with you some beach chair observations of the past week: red ant bites are less painful than I remember them being as a child, but more irritating. Also, the five hadedas I call ‘mine’ but reside in the neighbours’ pine tree have one member whose voice has broken, so some mornings I have four hadedas flying over and one Ford Cortina with a broken fan belt. Finally, I think I might be adventurous, and mix the Illy Filter with the Starbucks Mocca Java for a while.
[Image: https://pixabay.com/photos/bird-animal-flying-hadeda-5662431/]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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