Advance and Retreat

The Heart Beats by Resting

The year I turned fifty, I suddenly felt as though a bowstring had been drawn back to its very limit. To loose an arrow, you must first pull back. You draw the string to your chest, hold your breath, take aim, and release. The arrow's flight lasts only an instant, but the drawing takes long. And it is the drawing that determines the distance of the flight. In my younger days in Boston, I once received more than a dozen rejection letters in a row. Back then I thought life was retreating, only retreating. Now I know: that retreat was, in truth, the time the bowstring was being drawn. That moving forward is not the only advance. There is one place where our body shows this truth most honestly. It is the heart.

Seen in space, the boundary is a membrane; seen in time, it is a rhythm. For the boundary is, in the end, a passing back and forth between this side and that, and the passing becomes rhythm within time. Look at the heart. The heart does not only beat. It contracts, and it relaxes. It squeezes, and it releases. It advances, and it retreats. If the heart were to forget relaxation and go on contracting alone—that is rigidity, and that is death. The heart beats by resting.

There is a still more astonishing fact. A healthy heart does not beat at an even pace. The interval between beats is forever shifting by minute degrees. This is called heart rate variability (HRV), and the greater this variability, the healthier. Conversely, when the intervals between beats grow identical, like a machine's, it is a sign that the body has stiffened and is in peril. In fact, low heart rate variability is used as an indicator that foretells the risk of heart disease and death. The nearer one draws to death, the more the electrocardiogram moves toward a single straight line. A perfectly regular rhythm is not rhythm but a standstill.

What is fixed is dead. What is alive pulses.

What conducts this rhythm is the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the body's brake. It calms an excited body, slows the heart, and switches on digestion and recovery. It is the nerve that makes a body that only advances step back. According to the theory of the neuroscientist Stephen Porges, this vagus nerve works best when we feel safe and are warmly connected to another. The research of the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson discovered here an astonishing virtuous circle. Warm relationships strengthen the power of the vagus nerve, and a strengthened vagus nerve in turn makes deeper relationships possible. The capacity to retreat, in other words, is not made alone. Only when there is someone to support us can we at last release our tension. The restoration of rhythm borders upon the restoration of relationship.

I have long thought that health is the rhythm of advance and retreat. Yet I came to learn, belatedly, that this thought was not mine alone. The historian Arnold Toynbee saw that those who accomplish great things, and civilizations too, grow by the same rhythm, and he called it "withdrawal and return." The one who accomplishes something great does not win straightaway in the thick of the world. First he withdraws—into the wilderness, into solitude—and, changed within, returns with fresh strength to change the world. The inner journey that the psychologist Jung called "individuation" is no different. Setting out from different places, these thinkers arrived at the same rhythm I had seen in the body. Retreat is the outbreath; return is the inbreath. As the heart beats by resting, so too do people and civilizations grow by withdrawing and returning.

Now we can name once more the sickness of a life that only swells. It is a life that only advances and knows not how to retreat, a heart that only contracts and cannot relax. That rhythm stiffens toward a single straight line. The way to save it is not to make it beat harder, but to help it recover the art of beating by resting. And the secret of that rest we shall find, in the next chapter, within a single breath.

References

Stephen Porges (polyvagal theory) · Fredrickson & Kok (2013) · Arnold Toynbee (withdrawal and return) · J. G. Sparks (2017)