In favor of taking more of life lying down

Who said sitting up in chairs was so great in the first place?

I would prefer to be lying down most of time. I rarely find chairs comfortable. I don’t particularly like sitting upright. Maybe this was different when I was younger, with fewer aches and pains, but for the last ten years or so, this preference has been reinforced by intermittent back pain that, especially by the end of the day, makes me very much want to be lying down.

I want to be lying down on my back. On our couch in the kitchen propped up with pillows. Or our living room couch. Or in warm weather, in the lounge chair in our backyard, which is covered with plush cushions and adjusted until I’m pretty close to horizontal, which is an optimal position for both reading and napping. If you picture me in my house, picture me prone.

One evening, some friends were coming over for drinks. I’d lost track of time or they were late or early. At any rate, they caught me in my usual position, lying down on the kitchen couch, reading a book.

“Did we wake you up?” one of my friends said, laughing as if they’d caught me at something.

No, they had not woken me, though there’s every chance they might have. Probably not surprisingly for someone who likes to lie down, I am also a frequent napper. On days when I’m not working and especially in the summer, I take my first nap after lunch. Then usually another in the late afternoon, after tea. If it’s an evening when we’re reading or watching baseball, there might be an evening nap, too.

That night my friends found me on the couch, I felt caught-out. Like I’d been discovered doing something naughty. Or transgressive. Or, yes, of course, lazy.

Sometimes when people discover me lying on the couch or the lounge chair in the middle of the day, they ask in a concerned voice if I’m sick. Am I feeling well? This question reveals so much. Lying down is a sign that something is wrong. It’s what we do when we have no choice. Lying down is what we’re forced into when our bodies fail us instead of an act that just feels good.

Photo by Ilham Rahmansyah on Unsplash

Lying down is my preferred state of being and also one of those things I’m a little ashamed of. Lazy people lie down all the time. Sick people lie down. People with disabilities do nothing but lie down. Normal people do not lie down in the middle of the day. Healthy people sit up in chairs. Productive people perhaps never sit down at all, but remain in a constant state of motion. To lie down is to surrender to gravity, which is, frankly, pulling on our badly designed, upright bodies all the time. Gravity is relentless. To lie down is to give up and give in.

Lying down is weakness. We refuse to take things lying down. We let sleeping dogs lie, lying being a state of inaction and passivity. When we lay down our arms, we surrender. We rest. We stop, in a culture where stopping might be the worst possible thing to do.

We do not live in a world made for lying down, so it is something I only do in privacy. When my husband and I watch TV together, I lie down on the couch, my head propped against him as he sits. He strokes my hair. Cats pile on top of me. I am prone and content and even to tell you this secret about my private life feels dangerous. I would prefer to take so much of the world lying down. What does that say about the kind of person I am?

Of course, to be able to sit up is form of body privilege. Many people cannot. In the beginning, none of us can. Sitting up is a skill we have to learn. If we live long enough, it’s an ability that will probably leave us, which seems like a pretty big deal.

Chairs, the furniture in which we spend most of our upright lives, are after all, about power more than they are about comfort. As a sociologist, it should have occurred to me to question the dominance of the chair. Why do we have so many chairs and spend such large chunks of our lives sitting in them? It took

Sara Hendren

’s book, What Can a Body Do? to remind me that both chairs and the sitting in them have their own history. A history that’s almost always bound up with power.

Sure enough, for most of human history we moved in many ways that rarely involved chairs. We squatted. We crouched. We sat criss-cross on the ground. For a long time, when we did sit on something that wasn’t the ground, it was more likely to be a stool than a chair.

The things we recognize now as chairs developed as expressions of power. The first chairs allowed some people to sit higher than others, the classic example being a throne. Those chair/thrones evolved first in Egypt and southern Europe and endured through the Middle Ages. This long association between power and chairs persists in our language, where to chair a committee is to be in charge. Until the Industrial Revolution made them more affordable, chairs were mostly reserved for the wealthy and the powerful. The rest of us would have rarely sat in a chair.

Chairs, in other words, reflect culture rather than any natural inclination for how human bodies should move. From a physiological and ergonomic perspective, chairs are a very bad idea. As Galen Cranz writes in The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design, chairs are the major cause of a lot of pain and disability. As a culture that sits in chairs for hours and hours, that sitting weakens our back and core muscles, pinches the nerves in our rear ends, and constrains the blood flow our body very much needs. There’s evidence that jobs that require prolonged amounts of sitting actually shorten life expectancy. Chairs are, in some ways, killing us.

A toddler collapses onto the floor in the grocery store or the sidewalk and their parent tells them to stand up. Get up off the floor. Sit up. Sit up straight.

One of my college students rests their head on the desk and I have to resist the urge to read the gesture as one of rebellion. Or disrespect. Or laziness. I have to remind myself that our chairs are uncomfortable. My chair is uncomfortable and it’s the same as the one they’re sitting in. Our classes last seventy minutes. This is too long to ask anyone to sit.

I lie reclined on my lounge chair, but when people come over, I pull it upright. Who do I think I am, to be recumbent in the presence of other people?

At the end of a yoga class, I lie on the floor in shavasana. Corpse pose. The final reward for moving my body in all the ways it longs to be moved. I don’t know if I ever feel as good as I do there on the mat, my eyes closed. My body prone. Preparing for the final repose.

What if we let the toddler lie on the floor of the grocery store? What if we joined them? What if we all took a moment to lie our heads on our desk in class? Or what if we took turns lying on the floor? What if we designed classrooms with standing desks or reclining chairs? What if we lectured on long walks instead of sitting for seventy minutes straight? What if we were less concerned with body discipline? What if we cared more for the soft, fragility of our actual bodies than we did for some idea of their correct shape or posture?

What if we lived in a world where it was okay to just lie down?