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by Jonathan D. Simon, D.C. If you sit on a bench and watch people walk by, you will notice, if your eye is trained, an array of bad postures, uneven gaits, patterns of structural imperfection and associated tension at wide variance from what is anatomically possible for our species at its structural best. If you could look inside the minds of these people passing, you might see a corresponding array of nonstructural tensions, as they work ceaselessly to hold off the threats and challenges surrounding them. There is no assailant visible, perhaps, but so many of these ordinary people are under assault: they might have been born into it or have grown used to it and so do not notice, but the very breadth of their knowledge assaults them, the disharmony and busyness of their city, the complex requirements of life. Unlike people born into the simpler rhythms of a rapidly vanishing life, our people—though arguably better off in many ways—carry a world view which, even in leisure, rarely if ever allows for repose. They are not attached to the land, they do not make things with their hands, they do not witness birth or death (except as sensationalized through media); they sense that we are fabricated, not really born, to fit into a dwarfing steel-concrete-glass-plastic-synthetic environment whose seeming indestructability (how would you go about taking down the Citicorp Center?) throws up the disturbing illusion of immortality: death, banned from the room, whispers outside the door; pathetic clumps of green and patrolled parks show Nature reduced to little islands in our self-important sea. People notice diseases, they notice bad knees, they notice wrinkles, they notice pain. They do not notice their posture, their gait, their breathing. They do not notice their fundamental fears, the ever-present psychological assailants. These, unlike disease symptoms, are constants, and we tend to notice change. It is no wonder then that so much attention hasbeen focused on diseases, on the things that go wrong with a person's body, and so little on the things that are wrong, have been wrong throughout all or much of the person's life. Tolstoy told the story, in "The Death of Ivan Ilych," of a man whose life had been "most ordinary and therefore most terrible." His life, molded to fit the standards of normality and respectability, was wrong, but this did not occur to him until he was almost through the battle with the disease—affecting some organ or other, it was never clear which one—that ended his life. With their detachment, condescension, and futile ministerings, the doctors appear simultaneously offensive and ridiculous, but who else's counsel is there for Ivan Ilych to follow? If we could only have intercepted him as a younger man—urbane, practical, competitive, upwardly mobile. If we could have seen the tension in his scalenes, his TMJ, the lack of fullness in his breathing. If we could have noticed the rigidity of his posture, how his weight did not flow through his body to his feet when he walked.

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