HEALTH AND WELLBEING.

The Joy of Mess. 

A newborn baby enters the world as a perfect being. Wrapped up in a cocoon of vulnerability, open to the world and completely whole. They do not judge or divide. They experience the world and express it, bodily. A cacophony of mess and emotion, that as they grow they continue to so beautifully embody.

Yet advancements in science and medicine, both wondrous and detrimental, have inadvertently sterilised the human experience and distanced mind from body. Somewhere in the midst of our development, we begin to understand that our “mess” our grief, our love, our neediness and our bodily functions are intolerable.

We have developed a belief that we are ordered and rationale, independent beings. However as humans we are complex constellations of chaos, of mess- we are perceptive, rather than rational, emotional before we are logical, relational before we are individual.

And within the notion of “mess” lies the feeling of contrast, between the natural perfection of our being at birth, that we never really move away from- and the imperfect realities we encounter as we grow. Vivek Murpthy articulates “I think to truly feel whole — it’s not about acquiring something that we don’t have. It’s about remembering who we fundamentally are-”

It’s in our “imperfections”— our vulnerability, our contradiction, our stories, that the joy of our aliveness resides.

H.Coutts.

16.Oct.2025.