Jim Fadiman wrote that if you don't listen to your body when it whispers, it speaks. If you don't listen to it when it speaks, it shouts.

He was talking about health and illness. The body also wants more than not illness.

When I was getting on the F streetcar in downtown San Francisco this morning, two twenty-something women got on ahead of me--mild-mannered people from the middle of the country. The location implied they had just left the Hyatt Regency and were off to see the city.

They asked the driver if this car would take them to Fisherman's Wharf. He said no, they had to catch the F car going the other way, on the other side of the street.

As they got off, one of them walked directly into me, hard. It didn't feel hostile. Considering where I was standing, off to the side to get out of there way, it seemed deliberate, and I thought, "Huh?" It felt like she wasn't there for it.

She didn't knock me over because I'm taller than her and maybe because I've been reading George Leonard's book "The Way of Akido," where he talks about focusing on your center, two or three inches below your belly button.

I didn't fall over. She apologized profusely, like the mild-mannered person she appeared to be.

As the two women walked away, I looked at them more closely. They didn't look like people who currently thought of themselves as lesbians.

They did look like larval lesbians. They looked like people who might eventually think of themselves as lesbians, or who might try to skip that whole part of life and take out the change in heartiness and accidental aggression

Maybe she had done what she partly came to San Francisco to do--make contact with a lesbian. Things go more smoothly if the conscious mind is in on making the to-do list.

I used to drop stuff a lot. Now I drop stuff less. I know more who I am, and I'm usually holding what I want to hold.