Excerpt from Seven Sins for a Life Worth Living
By Roger Housden

When it comes to the belly – my belly, that is, - there has always been a slight protuberance for as long as I can remember. A little more than slight, perhaps. I eat well, mindfully that is – lots of avocado, lettuce, wild salmon, and chocolate mousse. When I forgo the latter for a while, the rise seems to subside, though never for too long. I concluded years ago that this gently bulge is part of the Housden shape. This Housden’s shape, anyway. It’s great to feel lithe, but a good mousse now and then is perhaps marginally better. It just doesn’t seem to make sense to deprive myself of such a genuine pleasure. There’s great satisfaction to be found in a little of what you fancy, my father would say, and I would agree. Too much would be going too far, though, whatever too much is.

Today noses and bellies are routinely smoothes out all over the world, while other areas of the anatomy are as routinely buffed up and amplified. Very few of us are perfect specimens of the human form. We all have our physical imperfections, and many of them we share with most everyone else. Breasts are too small, thighs are too thick, cheeks are too plump, there’s always something not quite right. That’s generally how it is with the human body: not quite right.

So if you don’t like the body you have, you can, as Michael Jackson did, go so far as to change it almost beyond recognition. And you will soon be able to beef up those muscles without going to all the effort of going to the gym. A boy was born three years ago whose upper arm muscles were abnormally large. By the age of two he could lift weights that would be a stretch for a ten-year-old. Curious scientists discovered that he had a gene that most people don’t. It isn’t any longer science fiction to suggest that within a few short years that gene will be transferable to other newborns.

You can just as easily change your mind as you can your body. We already have pills for memory, but it won’t be long before you can download Google directly into your brain. A Google implant is definitely on the way. Welcome to the world of the enhanced human being. Botox and Viagra will seem quaint in a few years time. Perhaps the gym membership will seem quaint as well. After all, if you can get the results without all the sweat, then why not pay up and have yourself biochemically and genetically tuned?

Not that our urge to become an improved model is anything new, or merely a sign of western civilisation’s general decline: the desire for self-improvement is as old as the human race. Young Greeks were working out two and a half thousand years ago. Montaigne wrote of French women in the sixteenth century that he had

seen some of them swallow sand and ashes, and work deliberately to ruin their stomach, so as to get pale complexions. To get a slim body, Spanish style, what torture do they not endure, tight-laced and braced, until they suffer great gashes in their sides, right to the live flesh – yes, sometimes even until they die of it?

Then think of all those monks in the desert in the first few centuries after Christ, twisting their bodies and minds into contortions in their attempts to climb the ladder to heaven. We have always felt less than perfect in one way or another, and we probably always will. Even when we have got the best body we could ever hope for; even when, a few years from now, we can buy a memory chip at Radio Shack, or have surgery for a muscle gene, a math gene, or some other enhancement gene (it’s not if, it’s when), the feeling that we are incomplete will not go away.

It won’t go away because it comes with the package of being human. It’s in our hard drive. Something always seems to be missing, even if we can’t put our finger on it. Because it’s not easy to identify, we often blame it on conditions. We aren’t earning enough, we don’t have the right partner, we are in an East Coast winter when we could be sitting in the warmth of California. But we earn more, we change partners, we go to California, and though life may be more comfortable and warm – there’s no denying the consolation in that – the itch for something more or different remains the same.

So we meditate, we go into therapy, we take classes to improve our sex lives, we read books on how to find our vocation and “follow our bliss”. But while any or all of these strategies may have genuine benefits, none of them will fix the underlying problem, because the problem is not fixable It is part and parcel of the human story. Ultimately, working on yourself – trying to change the basic program – doesn’t really work, because limitation, imperfection, is build into our genetic code.

In a results driven culture like ours, a suggestion like this borders on heresy. We tend to assume that every problem has a solution if only we persist and use the right technology. And in a global culture we can search for solutions all over the planet. If it’s self-knowledge we need, the Tibetans, for example, must know what’s what. They have developed technologies of the mind over a thousand years. Or Zen monks from Asia. Surely they can help us on our way.

Of course they can. But they may not lead us where we think we want to go. In the end every tradition that specialises in the spiritual welfare of human beings seems to have one teaching in common. Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew – all agree that, ultimately we can only bow our heads to the fact of our limitations and to the mystery of existence. They would echo the words of the poet T.S. eliot when he said that

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

If you look at the self-help best seller list, however, you will find it full of titles like Ask and It Is Given; Manifest Your Destiny: Nine Spiritual Principles for Getting Everything You Want; The Magic of Believing; and The Spontaneous Fulfilment of Desire. I have read none of these books, and they may well contain wisdom that I am in need of myself. But their titles lead me to suspect that these authors are peddling the magical thinking of a five-year-old as a cure for the adult’s longing for the perfect life. As if a life worth living depended on the fulfilment of all our desires.

Humility brings us down to earth and lets us acknowledge our true condition, which his that we are flawed and were never meant to be otherwise. The perfection fantasy exists to shore up our illusion of having some control over a life that will never, in reality, conform to our plans.