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Ask a biologist what life is, and you will get, usually after some hesitation, a reasonably precise but rather clinical answer. There must be a flow of energy through a structure that shows a certain degree of organization. There must be a membrane that separates an inside from an outside. And there must be a capacity for replication, and with it for evolution. It is a sensible answer, grounded in years of academic study and the decades of research that preceded it, so about as “true” as an answer can be, and yet for me something keeps chafing. I cannot quite be satisfied with it. To me, the most familiar phenomenon we know refuses to be captured in these words.
I think that is because the usual definitions keep naming something slightly besides what life actually does1. They describe the parts, the substances, the structures, and the conditions. But life is not a collection of parts or of linear processes. Life is something that happens continuously. And if you look closely at what happens then, in every cell, in every organism, from the simplest to the most intricate, you see the same underlying pattern returning everywhere. Movement that recurs. Repetition in time: rhythm.
Everything that lives has rhythm
Take the smallest unit we dare to call alive: a single cell. Even there, where no heart beats and no lungs breathe, rhythm is present. The cell’s metabolism proceeds in waves: glycolysis, for instance, the process by which the cell converts sugar into energy, occurs in rhythmic pulses, from bacterium to yeast cell to human. And across the cell membrane, the cell continuously maintains a tension, a gradient of ions that is forever being built up and restored. The cell keeps itself alive not by standing still at some favourable point but by moving ceaselessly around that point. Homeostasis, that fine word for a state of balance, is not stillness. It is an oscillation, a constant balancing, a rhythmic correcting. It is rhythm that keeps the organism on course.
And so it is everywhere, at every level. Cell division proceeds in cycles. Metabolism is a chain of recurring reactions: take in, convert, release, again. Heartbeat and breathing are rhythmic, and these rhythms even tune themselves to one another. Think of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), in which the heart rate moves along with the breath, quicker on the in-breath and slower on the out-breath. In the belly, we see the rhythmic movements of peristalsis; in our hormonal system, a much slower rhythm; and in the head, the faster rhythms of brain waves.
Almost every organism has a day-and-night rhythm, an internal clock that attunes itself to the turning of the earth. There is the rhythm of life and the rhythm of the seasons. Look very closely at a living system or an organism, and you will never see stillness, but movement in patterns.
What is interesting is that this idea does not contradict the existing definitions but rather draws them together. Look again at what the biologists named. A flow of energy is only a flow when there is a difference between two poles, and a difference that returns regularly in time is rhythm. Homeostasis is oscillation. Replication is repetition. Even the more abstract descriptions arrive at rhythm: the physicist Schrödinger saw life as something that feeds on what he called negative entropy, ceaselessly drawing energy and order from its surroundings so as not to sink into thermodynamic equilibrium, the state in which all difference has been leveled out and nothing moves any longer, which he equated with death. The systems thinkers Maturana and Varela described life as a network that keeps bringing itself forth anew, and that “anew” is precisely what it is about.
So all these definitions point, often without saying so in as many words, to the same thing. It is not the material aspects that are decisive, but the movement that repeats itself within them. Once you see that, you also grasp at once what death is. Death is not the disappearance of something, but the falling still of rhythmic movement. A body that has just died contains, materially speaking, all the substances it held moments before, and even the structures are still there: the cells, the organs, all the tissues. What is missing is not substance, but rhythm. The currents of circulation, metabolism, and life energy have fallen still. Life and death differ not in what is there, but in whether it still moves.
And perhaps this holds not only for death itself. I sometimes hear people who have been through trauma say, “At that moment my life stopped.” It is an apt phrase, for in the rigidity of the freeze response, something literally falls still. The breath catches, movement freezes; supple mobility gives way to rigidity and immobility. That too is a disappearing of rhythm, a small death within life.
Recovery runs along the same path: the task is to let rhythm return, in the breath, in movement, in daring once again to alternate between tension and release. We start small, and the body begins to pick the rhythm up again and let it expand. Whoever starts moving again starts living again.
Now an attentive reader might object that non-living things can be rhythmic too. The pendulum of a clock, a wave of the sea. And that is right: rhythm alone does not yet make something alive. The statement that everything that lives has rhythm is not the same as the claim that everything that has rhythm also lives. In this essay I am asserting the first, not the second. There is no living being without rhythm, while alongside that there are countless lifeless things that may well have rhythm.
What life adds to the rhythm of the pendulum is that life brings forth and maintains its rhythm itself. A pendulum is set going from outside and, at some point, swings ever more slowly, until someone winds the clock again. A living organism winds itself up, over and over, and so keeps its rhythm going for as long as it lives.
If we ask where and how polyvagal theory fits into this essay, then rhythm, as a basic condition for life, belongs with the oldest of the three autonomic systems: the dorsal one. But we must be precise, for rhythm is far older than the dorsal system. It existed long before there was a nervous system or a vagus nerve. We already find it in the earliest multicellular animals: in the sponges, which have no nervous system and no true muscles and yet contract rhythmically to pump water through themselves. They do so with proteins and signaling substances akin to those of muscle and nerve, which were therefore already present before muscles and nerves existed. And a little later (some hundred million years), the first true nervous systems appear in the cnidarians, such as the jellyfish: not a brain, but a diffuse nerve net. Tellingly, from the very beginning, it stands in the service of rhythm. Around the rim of the jellyfish’s “bell” sit small sensory knobs with pacemaker neurons that set the tempo, and the impulse they fire makes the bell contract rhythmically so that the jellyfish pulses along. Rhythm, then, is the ground on which the whole animal kingdom is built: it is there before the nerve, and as soon as nerves appear, they immediately put rhythm to use.
Only much later did the vertebrates arise, and with them the dorsal vagal system that took over this ancient rhythm and put it to work for rest, recovery and digestion. Later still came the sympathetic system, which gave us, alongside rhythm, also reach: the possibility of moving towards something or away from it. And the last of the main autonomic systems to develop was the ventral, social system, which gave us, alongside rhythm and reach, also relationship2.
Everything that lives has rhythm
I find it a beautiful formulation, and not only because I think it is true. It is also true in a way you can experience. The scientific definitions describe life more from the outside, as though you were looking in through a window. Rhythm describes life from the inside as well, as it is lived. Whoever breathes feels the rhythm. Whoever feels their heart racing or coming to rest feels the rhythm. Whoever moves, rests, wakes, sleeps, exerts themselves, and recovers lives their life as a succession of rhythms. And whoever learns to feel and to tend those rhythms, in the breath, in movement, in the alternation of tension and release, is thereby tending life itself.
Perhaps the finest thing about my description is that it draws the connection between the single-celled creature and the human being, the ion current and the heartbeat, between biology and experience. In this way you make of life not a checklist, but one continuous, rhythmic movement, from the first cell in the primordial soup to the breathing of this very moment. And another handy thing: it is short enough to remember, to be true, and to stay with you.
Everything that lives has rhythm.
Nowhere does the human being celebrate its rhythmic nature as plainly as in music. No culture is without a musical tradition, and that is no coincidence. Once the music becomes audible, it has its effect throughout the whole body: the foot taps along, the head nods, the breath, and even the heartbeat begin to fall in with what we hear.
We attune ourselves, just as the heart attunes to the breath and the internal clock to the turning of the earth, but now together, with one another. Whoever moves in time within a group coincides for a moment entirely with their rhythm and with that of the others. Music is perhaps the finest form of attunement: rhythm that we not only undergo but also make, share, and celebrate ourselves. And it is no coincidence that people turn to music, to singing together and moving together, to feel more alive again.
All of life is rhythm
Toute la vie est rythme
To round off this essay, I invite you to watch the short documentary below3. Under ten minutes, and well worth it. The theme is (of course) rhythm. Beautifully filmed in West Africa, the documentary explores the role of rhythm (“foli”) in the life, work, music and play of the people of Baro, a region in Guinea.
Direct link to the movie.
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A few definitions of ‘life’:
Dawkins, strictly speaking, gives no definition of life but of what lies beneath it: the replicator. In The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Extended Phenotype (1982), a replicator is anything of which copies are made, with the gene as the copying machine. Life is then not a thing in its own right, but what replicators build: we are their survival machines. This is life reduced to information that passes itself on, exactly the “what life is rather than what life does.”
John Maynard Smith (with Eörs Szathmáry) gives the classic evolutionary definition: living is anything that possesses the properties of multiplication, variation, and heredity, or descends from such entities (The Origins of Life, 1999). That last clause is no accident, for their own textbook example is the mule, which unmistakably lives but cannot reproduce and remains “alive” only because its parents could. Here too, replication and evolution are central.
Lynn Margulis (with Dorion Sagan), in What Is Life? (1995), sets something against this. She rejects replication as the core and opts for autopoiesis, the continuous bringing-forth and maintaining of oneself through metabolism, in the line of Maturana and Varela. Their famous formulation: life is more like a verb than a noun, a material process and not a thing. This is why they exclude viruses (which do not metabolize), where Dawkins would rather include them.
What Margulis expresses biologically has a longer, philosophical lineage: the process view, which does not ask what life consists of, but what it continuously does. In this line, reality is not a collection of things, but a continuous happening, becoming rather than being. Heraclitus already captured this in the formula later attributed to him, panta rhei, everything flows, and in the image that you never step into the same river twice.
The NASA working definition (attributed to Gerald Joyce): life as a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. This is the operational fusion of Dawkins and Maynard Smith, and thereby the sharpest contrast with Margulis, for it makes Darwinian evolution a condition, where Margulis precisely lets it go.
I first heard this lovely alliteration (in Dutch: ritme, richting [“direction” in English, which I translated as ‘reach’ to keep the alliteration] en relatie) and metaphorical rendering of the three main autonomic systems from my fellow therapist and polyvagal enthusiast Jessica Scholte, with thanks!
Credits:
Educational documentary about rhythm and daily life in West Africa. The film explores how rhythm (“foli”) exists in work, music, play, and community life. Dedicated to the people of Baro.
Life has a rhythm; it’s constantly moving. The word for rhythm (used by the Malinke tribes) is FOLI. It is a word that encompasses so much more than drumming, dancing, or sound. It’s found in every part of daily life. In this film, you not only hear and feel rhythm but you also see it. It’s an extraordinary blend of image and sound that feeds the senses and reminds us all how essential it is.
TREES: Before cutting the tree, there was a ceremony and an offering held for the tree. The tree was not only used for the jambe.
By the brothers Thomas Roebers and Floris Leeuwenberg. Film crew during one month in Baro, Guinea, Africa. Beautiful sound recording and sound design, Bjorn Warning. Translator and rhythm specialist Thomas Bonekamp.
With special thanks to the chief, DJEMBEFOLA: Mansa Camio. info@thomasroebers.com