I was thinking that the idea of the soul springs from one’s bearing witness to the body’s diminishing strength; that the desire for something else, something that lasts, comes only through a somewhat prolonged experience of bodily degradation. But that doesn’t make sense because youths believe in an eternal soul too.

A person in his or her twenties still believes he or she will live forever. A few pains may have set in, though not enough for him or her to have developed a yen for something beyond.

Perhaps young people simply accept the dogma of the soul as it’s been handed down, and older folks, with more aches and pains and a better view of what awaits them, repurpose the dogma they’ve simply accepted up till then. Of course a person is free to witness their body degenerate and draw no particular conclusion. Right about the time I stopped believing I had a soul, I took up Pilates.

The motivating factor was abiding back pain from things that in the past would have healed in a few days. The change in my belief system and the back problem coalesced, I guess. I’d come to believe that all life events were modulated by the body and the body only. So I had to care for it; not just so I might tie my shoes at seventy, but to achieve whatever I might achieve with less pain.