What "Dynamic Equilibrium" Taught Me About Living as a Flow

Shin-ichi Fukuoka's Dynamic Equilibrium: Why Does Life Reside There? is the book behind this personal record of what I've actually started doing at 66. Over the past year or so I've caught myself sighing at the bathroom mirror more often. Heavy eyelids, cheeks losing their line, age spots beginning to show. Aching joints and muscles have become the normal state of things, and I wake two or three times a night. It was around then that I read this book on molecular biology, and by the time I finished it, it had left me not with facts but with a way of looking at my own body.

1. Treating "me" as an eddy in a flow

At the heart of the book is an experiment by Rudolf Schoenheimer, a scientist now almost entirely forgotten. He fed mice labelled amino acids for three days, and found that the labels had scattered throughout the body, becoming part of the proteins in organ after organ — while the mice hadn't gained any weight. The old body had been discarded and replaced by what had been eaten. From this, Fukuoka argues that our bodies are not containers at all but temporary eddies formed by molecules passing through. Like dropping ink into a river to make the current visible: that image has stayed with me.

Since reading it, I've changed exactly one thing at the mirror each morning. Instead of "I've aged again," I say "I've been replaced again." Molecularly, the man I was a few months ago is already gone. Ageing is not a matter of running down; it's a matter of the replacement getting a little slower. Thinking of it that way takes a surprising amount of sting out of the face looking back at me. A trivial habit, but it changes how the day begins.

2. Understanding eating as the dismantling of information

In chapter two, Fukuoka calls digestion the dismantling of information. If another organism's proteins entered us intact, their information would collide with our own — so digestive enzymes break proteins down into amino acids, the way a sentence is broken into individual letters. Which means undigested food, even sitting in your stomach, is still outside your body. A human being, he writes, is essentially a hollow tube — a description that made me laugh out loud.

The sense is a little different, but it brought to mind something Jesus said:

Don't you understand that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the belly, and then out of the body? But the things which proceed out of the mouth come out of the heart, and they defile the man.

— Matthew 15:17–18 (World English Bible)

That perspective sent me to my supplement shelf. Swallowing collagen doesn't send collagen to my knees; it's taken apart into amino acids the moment it arrives, and my body puts those to whatever use it likes. Later in the book there's a passage noting that eating a whole medicinal herb often works better than taking a purified compound from it — and after more than twenty years working with Chinese herbal medicine, I found myself nodding hard. I've cut back on restocking single-ingredient tablets, and put the money and the time into eating things whole instead: tomatoes and cucumbers from the greenhouse, seasonal fish, leafy greens. What we can actually do for a longer healthy life turns out to be that unglamorous.

3. Small and often, not all at once — living non-linearly

Chapter three was a delight. The same excess calories eaten in one sitting versus spread out in small portions produce very different amounts of body fat, because inputs and outputs in nature don't follow a straight line — they follow a sigmoid curve, a stretched-out S. In the low-input region, the response is remarkably sluggish. We believe "what goes in comes out in proportion" only because our brains are poor at anything but proportion. Reading that, I found myself nodding along.

I've started applying this beyond food. Garden work gets cut off at an hour rather than finished in a day. A blog post gets thirty minutes each morning rather than one long night. And investing. I've been putting small amounts into the US, UK and Japanese markets for about ten years, and the urge to drop in a lump sum hasn't gone away just because I'm past sixty. Now I remember the phrase "sigmoid curve" and go back to the monthly standing order. If there's a way to stop worrying about money, I suspect it isn't landing a big win — it's keeping the amount small and the flow uninterrupted. Bodies and finances alike, I think, survive better by staying in motion.

4. Years pass faster because metabolism slows — so keep a record

The explanation in chapter one that startled me most concerns the body clock. Its second hand is the cycle of protein breakdown and synthesis, and metabolic speed reliably slows with age. So the internal clock turns more slowly while the outside world keeps the same pace. You still feel as though six months have gone by, and a full year has already passed. Years feel short in later life, Fukuoka argues, not because the denominator of your life has grown, but because the turnover rate of your biology can no longer keep up with actual time.

For me this became a prescription rather than an excuse. If I can't keep up, I can drive stakes into the ground outside myself. So I keep a greenhouse growing journal, write up trips, and write this blog. My memory is measurably worse — sometimes a name from last week simply won't come. But what's written stays. Writing doesn't only stand in for a weakening memory; it lets me go back and edit the time that has passed. I can't stop the years going quickly, but I can decide what was in them.

5. Doubting the patterns my brain invents — on difficult people

There's another uncomfortable point in chapter one. The human brain can't help finding patterns in randomness — seeing faces in clouds or in a stain on the ceiling. It's a leftover from an evolutionary past in which spotting clues in a complex environment kept us alive, and it survives today mostly as a habit of gluing causation onto unrelated things. Which is why Fukuoka warns against trusting intuition, and argues that we keep learning precisely in order to correct what intuition gets wrong — that we study in order to become free of our own biological constraints.

Honestly, there are several people I find heavy going. Some are relatives, some are from my working life. I get gloomy the night before seeing them. But my picture of "the sort of person they are" is a pattern this brain assembled from fragments, some of them years old. And they too are in dynamic equilibrium — molecularly, an entirely different person from the one I filed away. So before meeting someone like that, I now say one sentence to myself: "This person has been replaced too." It doesn't change them. What changes is the grip I had on my own image of them. That alone halves the tightness in the room. If asked what it means to be good, at the moment I'd answer: to hold what you think you see a little more loosely.

6. Anti-anti-ageing — living alongside decline

Near the end of chapter eight comes the book's most famous passage. In this universe, iron rusts, heat dissipates, order comes apart. No one escapes the second law of thermodynamics. Life anticipated this and chose to run ahead of it, constantly demolishing and rebuilding itself — and that is dynamic equilibrium. So, Fukuoka argues, hunting for a single cause behind one visible sign of ageing, and hoping a single compound will save you, is bad reductionism. What we can actually do is take enough nourishment and rest and avoid unnecessary stress. Being ordinary is the best strategy. And from that he arrives at his phrase: anti-anti-ageing.

This changed my daily life. For several years I'd been treating my own decline as a list of enemies. This remedy for the night-time bathroom trips, that supplement for the stiff joints, this puzzle app for the forgetfulness. Attacking them one by one was exhausting me. Now I keep only three things going: a morning walk, slow stretching after a bath, and less to drink before bed. When I wake at night and walk down the hall, I used to click my tongue — again. Now, in the dark, I think: updating. A silly rephrasing, but it works. The difficulty doesn't vanish; three in the morning is still a lonely hour. But beyond that loneliness there's a view I couldn't have seen when I was young. Understanding in your gut that breaking down and rebuilding are two faces of one process only became possible once my body actually began to break down. That view took sixty-six years to arrive.

7. Death as an act of generosity — passing things on

One more observation quietly floored me. Life looks selfish in its determination to keep the individual going, yet the fact that every organism dies is, Fukuoka writes, a profoundly altruistic system: before order collapses catastrophically, it transfers to another individual and resets. That is how life has continued for 3.8 billion years. He closes the book by noting how full the natural world is of spirals — shells, tendrils, currents, the eye of a typhoon, our own galaxy — which is why he put a spiral on the cover.

I sometimes wonder what my life has been for. Since this book, my answer has shifted slightly: perhaps not to leave something behind, but to let things pass through. In the garden, pulled weeds, fallen leaves and eggshells go into the compost bin and back into the soil; a few months later they arrive at the table as tomatoes. My own body returns to the same circle eventually. Finding that it's only that, I feel lighter. I write this blog in the same spirit now — recording life in Britain in Japanese, and Japanese books and haiku in English. If someone reads it and avoids stumbling where I stumbled, that's enough. No reply needed, no comment necessary. A gift doesn't have to travel in both directions to count.

Standing, properly, in the flow

What stayed with me was a feeling more than an idea: I am not a container, I am part of a current. Molecules arrive from the environment, briefly form this eddy called me, and are released back. If that's so, ageing isn't loss — it's a change in the speed of the flow. Not living and dying by numbers, eating things whole, moving in small increments, keeping a record, doubting my own view, coexisting with decline, and passing on what I received. None of it is extraordinary, but at 66 these are the habits I'd like to keep.

All the way through this book about life as a flow, one passage kept sitting at the back of my mind.

The earth was formless and empty. Darkness was on the surface of the deep and God's Spirit was hovering over the surface of the waters.

— Genesis 1:2 (World English Bible)

The book I mentioned here:

Shin-ichi Fukuoka, Dynamic Equilibrium: Why Does Life Reside There? (Kiraku-sha, Japanese edition)

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About the Author and His Times

Shin-ichi Fukuoka was born in Tokyo in 1959, and spent his boyhood chasing insects. That was the height of Japan's rapid economic growth, when the open lots of Tokyo were disappearing under housing one after another. Watching living things vanish in front of him as a child seems connected, somehow, to the position he has held ever since: that life is not something to be operated on. He studied at Kyoto University, then moved to the United States as a research fellow at Harvard Medical School.

His most productive years as a researcher, the 1980s and 90s, were exactly when molecular biology dominated science. The double helix had been read, gene splicing had been mastered, and the Human Genome Project was under way. It was also when science became a business. Genentech, the world's first biotech venture, was founded in 1976; its shares soared the moment they were listed and its researchers became millionaires overnight — a scene that spawned tens of thousands of imitators. The book's prologue is a record from inside that world. Fukuoka's Harvard supervisor told him that no one gets rich on a salary, founded his own company, spent his life chasing funding, kept tranquillisers in his desk drawer, and eventually burned out when the investors walked away. Fukuoka watched the frenzy of life science not as a critic but as a participant, and I think that is what gives his writing its particular steadiness.

In the 2000s his attention turned outwards. BSE, genetically modified crops, embryonic stem cells, and Dolly the cloned sheep, who died young — a decade in which the technologies for treating life as an assembly of parts generated one public anxiety after another. Through books aimed at general readers he took on the job of carrying specialist language to the public. What he criticises repeatedly in this book is the mechanistic view of life inherited from Descartes, and the antidote he reaches for is Schoenheimer's discovery from around 1940, long since forgotten. Digging up a buried finding and reconnecting it to the present — that historian's eye is what separates him from an ordinary populariser.

As a person, Fukuoka is a scientist who is unmistakably also a writer. Winter alleys in Paris, a school corridor in Tottori, and the design of a wind turbine all find their way into these pages. He translated the autobiographies of Lyall Watson and Kary Mullis himself, travelled widely chasing Vermeer's paintings, and refers to himself as "the Professor" with unbroken good humour. The serial that became this book, moreover, appeared in an environmental magazine devoted to LOHAS — lifestyles of health and sustainability. It is no accident that in 2009, as a linear age of pure efficiency and acceleration was visibly running out of road, a circular phrase like "dynamic equilibrium" found such a wide audience.