Moving Prose

When I tell you about how I used a French press to make coffee this morning, I move a lot. My lungs expand and contract as my diaphragm pulls itself taut and then relaxes. My mouth and tongue make funny shapes as the air passes by, and my larynx bounces up and down. Depending on how excited I am by the coffee this morning (or how much sleep I had last night), I may gesture. I may even pump my fist with enthusiasm if I have truly nailed it.

Likewise, as you listen to my raving, the sound waves reaching your ears induce a subtle but important dance inside your head—tiny bones sympathetically vibrate as part of a Rube Goldberg machine that brings the fact that I let the coffee bloom for about 20 seconds to your brain. You might also roll your eyes.

The eye-rolling is important, because it’s an example of what we call body language. (We will all be paying particularly close attention to this phenomena over the next few weeks as politicians attempt to persuade us of a number of things.) And while body language is more ambiguous and less intentional than spoken language, many important things can be perceived or inferred. Pay particular attention if there’s a large number of people running in the same direction: there’s probably a reason.

Sign language is, of course, almost completely reliant on the movement of the hands and arms. It’s not “body language” in the same sense as eye-rolling or panic-running—it’s fully-developed human language performed with different parts of our body.

Even just reading (certainly typing) is dependent on movement. Our eyes move about in their sockets to absorb the details of text encoded in light: funny little sudden movements called saccades, from the French, “violent pull”.

Language is movement.

(And making a second pot of coffee says a lot.)

Tension vs. Control

I’m reading a paper about motor learning. (“Motor” here refers to how we move our limbs and things about, not an engine in a car or a bus.) Anyway, there are people who study the damndest things about how we learn to tie our shoes or brush our teeth or learn to play the bassoon. This particular paper deals with how people who are learning something new tend to tense all the muscles involved—not just the ones you need to, say, swing a tennis racket for a backhand stroke, but all the damn muscles in your arm, even the ones that slow down your backhand.

As it turns out, people do this instinctively because the additional tension from the other muscles helps to keep the racket “on target”. The additional tension actually leads to better control and it even helps you learn the correct movements faster. But, as the person learns and practices and becomes more skillful, that tension gradually decreases. They no longer need the extra muscles to keep things aligned properly and to diminish the errors in movement. Efficiency becomes more important over time.

So the tension is something we need in the short term. And now it doesn’t really make a lot of sense when I think back to the experiences where people have told me, “OK, good, now just relax” after the first 2 minutes because doing that would actually slow down my progress. (And I, of course, have given the same unhelpful advice to others. Dammit...)

Maybe we can let the tension be for a while—just a little while as we get used to the new movements. It doesn’t have to feel relaxing or easy at first.

Breakfast by the Water

We ran errands the other morning, grabbing some breakfast to go at a cafe. We sat on the banks of a lake and ate. We sat in the shade, idly looking out at the lily pads when a crane flew in and stood among them in the water. There are stories about martial arts styles inspired by the movement of cranes, so I was curious to watch it for a while.

We watched it watch the water for a while. It stood still, then took a careful step forward and stood still some more. Its head seems to be a separate thing from the rest of its body: it extends horizontally out in front, like a probe, and then it takes a step so that its body can be close again, like an old-fashioned vacuum cleaner being pulled along behind the hose and nozzle.

Eventually, I noticed it noticing something, and again its head seemed to take the lead, ahead of its body. It turned its head smoothly to the right without moving the rest of its body and took a step in that new direction just before plunging its head down into the water. It came back up with a prize I couldn’t quite see (fish? frog?), but it was breakfast, in any case.

We used to have to work for food a lot more directly. We would need to cultivate patience, awareness, stillness and quick, decisive movements to be able to do that again. Breakfasts would be more… focused and engaging.

Efficient Exercises

The deadlift is a powerful activity because nearly every muscle in your body is exercised in order to move the weight off of the floor until you’re standing straight up—especially when the weight gets heavy.

Making soup (most cooking, really) is a powerful activity because all 5 of your senses are exercised: touch as you chop vegetables and stir the pot, taste (obviously), smell (also, duh...), sight (does it look like there are enough carrots? Have they turned that really bright orange yet?) and sound (how hot is the pan?).

Writing is a powerful activity because it exercises your creativity, judgement, style, vocabulary, sense of structure and it encourages clarity.

I think part of what makes these activities interesting is how much of us is engaged in them simultaneously.

Too Late to Stop Moving

A friend of mine that I used to work with was telling me about her grandfather one day. He still lives back in the Old Country. He was in his late 80’s or early 90’s when she told me this, and still lived by himself. Impressive!

She said he still chopped wood to heat his home. Not: he has a subscription to a wood chopping service to heat his home. She meant he still chops his own wood with his own personal axe and then carries it into his house so that he can make fires in the wood-burning stove during the winter months.

My first reaction was, “Wow, that’s amazing! I hope when I’m that old I can still get around by myself and do stuff.” But the more I thought about it and heard about other people in their golden years who were still active, I had a different thought:

They can still do things like chop and carry wood in their 80’s and 90’s because they never stopped doing it. It’s way easier to maintain a !tness or activity level than to try to increase it as we get older. Another friend of mine who’s a ski bum said he was on a mountain and shared a lift with “an old guy” who looked like he was in his 70’s. My friend, recognizing a sage when he saw one, asked him if he had any advice and the gentleman replied, “Never miss a season.”

It might be a good idea to pick a few things you’d like to be able to do in your old age and make a habit of doing them. Hint: walking had better be one of them.

Walking and Talking

Last Saturday we went to a farmer’s market that is set up in a parking lot. It was busy and we had to park in another parking lot just up the hill. It had rained a bit, off and on that morning—much needed rain.

There is no sidewalk between the two lots, but over time people (possibly lazy) had trod a rather direct path down the hill to connect them. The path was clear but narrow: punctuated by rocks and stones of various sizes and bare dirt which had turned slippery from the rain.

None of this is unique or interesting, of course, except that it’s less frequent in the city. It was just unusual enough compared to my normal homebound routine for me to have to pay attention to where I put my feet and to notice that I was doing so.

We talked a bit as we picked our way along the path, remembering trips to the Boundary Waters, noting that somehow our feet, legs and pants were getting disproportionately wet and dirty, discussing lunch plans and how we were going to cook and freeze the sweet corn we just bought.

There’s a lot going on there—looking, stepping, talking, listening—all at once and all more or less automatically. It’s two of the things we humans seem to be built for and they’re extraordinarily complicated, requiring a great deal of effort from our brainparts. And yet walking and talking are so fundamental to human behavior—they are at once both completely mundane and borderline magical. It’s probably also not a coincidence that being able to do them simultaneously is quite practical.

The idea that our excursion down the hill (and back up) that day was “coordinated hunter-gatherer behavior” is laughable, but it had the right elements—the same shape. It’s uniquely human and we shouldn’t simply give it up. A nice set of cement steps and landings wouldn’t necessarily make it better. And maybe taking the long way through the parking lot, down the street and into the market isn’t better exercise: maybe sometimes the shortcut is.

An Exercise for the Reader

If you’re in the mood, try this to see if you notice anything:

Stand on a carpet, area rug, yoga mat or wherever you feel comfortable doing something weird for a couple minutes.

1. Get down on the floor and lay on your back.

2. Get back up to a standing position

3. Do this 3-5 times on each side

I’m fairly comfortable with this kind of thing, and yet when I did it my abs seemed to notice I was doing something a little out of the ordinary. It’s work standing up and laying down on the ground repeatedly. My cats thought it was extremely interesting. Seems like a very unsexy, pedestrian sort of exercise: boring. But I can’t help thinking about what it must be like to not be able to bend and flex enough to get on the floor, or more importantly to get back up...

This Post is About Coffee

I like coffee—a little too much, probably. Depending on my mood and the time of day, I’ll either make it with a French press (I wonder what the French call it? “Le Presse”?), an Aeropress, a Moka pot or a pour-over/cone/funnel thingy. I enjoy the ritual most days and it’s relaxing.

I caught myself wondering the other day how I would design an automatic pour-over device and how that differs substantially from a drip coffee maker. (Too much engineering and coffee nerd stuff to unpack in that sentence.) A machine, after all, could be more accurate and precise; it would save me time in the morning...

But part of the luxury of coffee in the morning is the ritual, even if it is a little hurried sometimes. If I delegated that to a machine, I may as well just use our Nespresso machine. (told you: I like coffee a little too much)

So second best is that I watch someone else make it for me. I get to enjoy the ritual vicariously through them. Also relaxing, also effective and efficient.

But really, the difference between a human (me or anybody else) and a machine making my coffee is attention. It feels better to make it myself because I get to indulge in giving the ritual my attention and control the outcome. It feels better to watch someone else make it because I can see them giving it attention as well as observing and indirectly experiencing the process of making it.

To precisely monitor and control the making of my coffee is not the same as giving it attention. Technology doesn’t have attention to give.

Cooling Lap

It’s evening and it’s cooled off outside. It’s cooler and drier than we have any right to in August: it’s perfect.

I can hear the crickets outside, the fan in the next room and the plaintive, white noise from the few cars passing by each minute. They are mostly distant and listening to them (the cars, not the crickets) you could almost be forgiven for mistaking them for the sound of breaking surf on a strange beach. It isn’t quite the same as watching and listening to a fire after dark, but even the sounds of a quiet urban evening can have their charms. The similarity is that it’s mostly quiet and no one feels like they need to say anything at the moment.

I used to take walks on nights like this when I was in graduate school. Actually, I used to take walks almost every night when I was in graduate school. It was a “cooling lap” to relax and take my mind off of my classes. School required an awful lot of sitting and thinking, so the walking that I did to and from my apartment—whether for class or for relaxation—felt like it was good for clearing my head. And it helped me to become tired, to want sleep.

I may have to take up the practice again of doing a cooling lap before bed: to get a little tired, to listen to the city and the crickets, and to settle into a gait and a mood where I don’t feel like I need to say anything to myself for a while.

Postmodern Movement at Work – Still Standing

The benefit of working at a standing desk isn’t that you’re standing. It’s that you’re not sitting still.

When you stand, you’re constantly shifting your weight back and forth from one leg to the other. You might rock back and forth from the balls of your feet to your heels. You might arch your back once in a while. You might reach backwards with your arms or even overhead occasionally just to stretch. You might twist because you feel your hips, neck or back stiffen up. You might flex your knees a little because they’re stiffening up, too. If you’re like me, you might even crouch down once in a while to alleviate some of the tension that your tight hip flexors place on your lumbar spine. You might notice your posture and straighten up or re-align.

If you’re sitting down, your body is at a standstill. But it’s really hard to stand perfectly still.

(Nerd note: when you’re standing, your body is constantly solving the inverted pendulum problem. Your body doesn’t have to solve shit when it’s sitting down.)

A Theory of Yoga

I have a theory about the origins of yoga: it was developed by people in their late 40’s as a response to noticing how it might feel to be in your late 40’s. This elaborate theory follows in its entirety.

It wasn’t an esoteric, austere, way-too-hot-in-the-room, intense, super-exercise routine that some people seem to want to make it. There was no competing with the goddamn show-off two rows in front of you that still has a flexible spine and can actually sit in “easy pose” without falling over backwards and who doesn’t have hip flexors so tight that you could shoot an arrow 1,000 yards with them.

I think its original intent involves gentle stretching, but not in the sense of trying to become super flexible—it’s more about moving your joints through their available range of motion. Just trying to get their back to feel a little better. Just trying to work out the stiffness in their legs. It might be about making sure you can get down on the floor and get back up again.

I think it’s exactly the same thing as getting out of bed and stretching your arms out because it feels good—there’s just a whole bunch of those for all your body parts with cool Sanskrit names. I love yoga best when I’m just letting my body remember how to assume, move through and enjoy a variety of postures.