Heroes Not Zombies

Some people say there is no such thing as a life force. Maybe there isn’t. Well, not an entity or a thing you could call a life force, not something you can grasp, directly observe or measure. But as a concept, as a phenomenon, it makes a lot of sense to me.

I always found it helpful to think of the life force as a blend of the body’s self healing capacity, the energy state of the whole system, and the quality of that vague phenomenon we call well being or vitality.

It’s something we all know. It’s subjective, not objective, yet we can all detect it. You can look at a plant and know instantly that it’s in good or bad health. You know yourself whether or not your strength and resilience is in good form.

When I was a junior doctor in Paediatrics my mentor said he wanted to teach me how to recognise quickly a sick child. Seemed an odd comment at the time but as the weeks passed I understood perfectly what he meant. Once I was a GP it was indispensable to me to be able to walk into someone’s house and know in an instant that a child needed emergency care. You knew before examining them, before making a diagnosis, that you had to act with urgency.

At the other end of life’s journey I often wondered just what it was that changed so clearly when someone died. In that moment, in that instant, it was as if a light went out. Yes, I know about organ failure, about cardiac and respiratory arrest, about brain death, but there’s something not so easy to define which seems to occur at the moment of death and I still think of it as the end of the life force.

The other way I find this concept useful is in relation to healing. It just seems to me that there is no true healing other than through the processes of self repair. That helped me remember to be humble. Whatever treatment I recommended or delivered I knew that what I was doing was supporting the self healing, self repairing, self balancing functions of the person.

How’s your life force today? Vibrant? Strong? Healthy? Or weak, dull and needing attention?