"My Soul Has Adjusted"

A colleague mentioned to me recently that he doesn't sleep much—never more than a few hours at a stretch. "That can't be healthy," I said, and he told me that his body had adjusted.

That happens. The human body is a remarkable thing; it's made to function one way, with a certain amount of sleep, within a certain temperature range, with a certain kind of fuel. And yet, if those things aren't available, it adapts. And we recognize that adaptation—we know that our bodies were meant to have nutritious food and a minimum amount of rest and all that, and that if they aren't getting it and they're still functioning, something fundamental has shifted in order to accommodate that, to keep operating as best it can in the absence of optimal conditions.

For better or worse, the human soul seems to work pretty much the same way. The dangerous difference is that we’re not so quick to recognize it. When the soul doesn’t get what it needs to thrive, when it doesn’t get the fuel it was meant to run on or the environment it was created to thrive in, it adjusts as well. It finds a way to get by in less than optimal circumstances, without the food and water and fresh air that it needs to be all that it was meant to be.

But just like the body, it has to change to do so. Just like the body, it doesn’t work as well without the conditions it was created for, doesn’t grow to its full strength, doesn’t become exactly what it was meant to be…what it could have been if only the sunlight hadn’t been obscured or the water hadn’t been polluted or any of a hundred other possible contaminations or missing pieces. And I think that for the most part, we don’t notice. It’s not so easy to see our souls shriveling as it is our bodies, not as easy to detect that something isn’t working quite right. Our souls adjust.

And unless we recognize that that’s what’s happening and find them the right food, the right sunlight, enough fresh air, they shrink into something very different from what they were designed to be.

But finding the right food and re-adjusting to it isn’t always easy. It seems, perhaps, that if it’s what we were made for, if it’s what was made for us, then it should fit, should feel right, should be as natural as breathing. And without those adjustments, that might well be true. But breathing fresh air is painful if we’ve become accustomed to a different atmosphere, and vegetables are hard to digest after a steady diet of processed foods. It stands to reason that if we’ve been feeding our souls a lot of junk and they’ve adapted, the good stuff isn’t going to go down easily—that’s going to take another round of adjustment.