Re-Wilding Our Language

The problem with the wellness meme is that it’s become weak, pale, thin and flabby. It has no claws, no teeth, no bone and no blood. It’s sterile, corporate and lifeless. Even worse, wellness has now been watered down and repackaged into a marketing pitch, a glossy layer that’s added onto a vast range of products and services. No one really knows what wellness is, but it has a certain look and feel that can be readily hawked to consumers. Slender, smiling, Photoshopped models may look well, but they sure aren’t real.

And so the time has come to trash the word wellness and replace it with the word wildness. The beauty of wildness is that it has a deep and powerful history that puts us back into community with all the other creatures of the earth. It’s a powerful antidote to the domestication that pulls so many of us into the pit of sedentary living and ill-health.

Wellness is bland, indoor language, but as we all know, people are spending too much time indoors as it is. In contrast, wildness is a vibrant outdoor word, one that conjures up associations with seasons, textures, wind, water, animals and vistas. The word resonates with our innate sense of biophilia, our inborn desire to associate with living things.

We can feel our wildness at a deeply cellular level; it’s our original, Paleolithic nature. In contrast, wellness feels like nothing at all. It doesn’t inspire our spirit, our passions or our connection with the living world. When was the last time you saw a powerful, healthy animal in a natural outdoor setting and exclaimed “Wow, that animal looks really well”?