Old School
Apparently, world-class mathematicians prefer to work on blackboards more than any other medium. (And some have quite a taste for high-quality chalk.) One might think that blackboards would be considered too restrictive, too slow, too imprecise for high-powered math—clearly a job for high-speed, hi-res, high-tech computers.
But I can see their point: chalkboards are an enormous expanse of real estate to work out both abstract theories and concrete expressions, and you can look at your work up close or at a distance with a field of view that computer screens have yet to match.
And chalk: a substance that allows for quick erasure, deliberate smudging and modification; variation in line weight and shading. My high-school physics teacher had a favorite technique for drawing dotted lines: holding it at a steep angle to the board while “pushing” it would make it skip along the surface. With a little practice, you could produce a long arc of beautifully spaced dashes. Imagine another writing tool that gives you such immediate access to such a wide variety of techniques! (Charcoal, perhaps?)
Working at a blackboard is inherently kinesthetic: standing (sometimes crouching!), moving side to side, toward and away, hand and arm applying a variety of forces depending on the technique used to write or draw. It’s a level of engagement on par with sculpting or painting—the effort is physical, concentrated and the feedback is immediate.
Whiteboards don’t really allow for the same interaction. The scale is similar, but they are too slick and glossy to provide satisfying resistance—unless you count the resistance provided by a dried-out dry erase marker. The range of techniques is limited: just try to smudge a line on a whiteboard! It’s too fragile; it simply vanishes. And even photographing a whiteboard to capture the final result can be problematic because of glare and contrast.
We need more blackboards and lots of chalk—we can do better thinking with them.
Do the math.
Falling All Over Ourselves
We humans tend to walk on two legs, which works out well most of the time. Walking is great: it’s efficient and pleasant and we can chew gum, talk on our phones (stop it) or point at birds and snap our fingers while we’re doing it because we only need 2 legs to walk, not 4. But we give up some stability by only using 2 legs, and since we’re “walking upright” like a bunch of showoffs, most of our body is at a significantly higher altitude than our legs.
Sometimes we fall over, or trip. Or are tripped by mischievous... well, never mind. We sometimes lose our balance and fall. This isn’t that dangerous most of the time, except when you see something like this:
(Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times)
See Aaron Rodgers? (The guy with the yellow helmet) He’s being tackled at high speed. He’s lost his balance and he’s going to fall all the way to the ground—no doubt about it. He has also instinctively put out his left hand to stop his body plus the considerable mass of the other human body on top of him. It’s pretty stressful for Aaron’s wrist, elbow and shoulder joint and all the bones in between.
Sometimes when people do this (without even being tackled) break some of the bones in their arm. It might be a strength-to-weight ratio thing, or it might be because our arms were really developed for hanging from tree branches, but it doesn’t matter—our arms suck for stopping our bodies from falling when we stick them straight out.
However, there is a set of remarkable techniques for addressing this very problem.
The woman in blue is going to impact the ground very soon and very forcefully. Notice she is paying attention to how far away the ground is and NOT trying to stick her left hand out to stop this from happening. The arts of Jujutsu and Judo teach ukemi-waza or break falls: how to be tripped, thrown, swept off your feet—and survive. The thing that these techniques all have in common is that 1) you DON’T put your hand down to try to stop yourself from getting closer to the ground and 2) you DO tilt your head away from the ground. They also teach you to try to land on a large part of your body to absorb the impact better and to slap the ground with your hand and arm. (Curiously, slapping may be taught simply to occupy your arm with a harmless activity that prevents you from doing something stupid with it, like sticking it straight out toward an appointment with an ambulance or Emergency Room.)
Overcoming the instinctive urge to reach for the ground requires considerable practice, but I think it would be interesting if more people did. There are a fair number of emergency room visits for people with broken collarbones that might be avoided, like my mom who stumbled and “caught” herself a while back, or another friend who damaged tendons and ligaments in her shoulder while trying to catch herself from falling backwards. (“Fall On Outstretched Hand” or FOOSH is a common emergency room term.)
I had a close call quite a few years ago myself when, on a crisp Winter morning I stepped down off of a cement step onto a sidewalk, not realizing that it was glare ice. My feet shot straight out across the ice and the rest of me followed quickly in a downward arc after a moment of weightlessness that seemed both very long and all too brief. That cement step stayed in place. I don’t know exactly how close my head came to the step or the icy sidewalk, but the break falls I had been practicing for the previous 10 years paid handsome dividends: I tucked my head toward my chest and slapped the ground with my arms instead of sticking my arms back behind me toward the ice that had just tried to assassinate me.
The practice of break falls definitely might not work at scale, because we’re really not comfortable rolling around on the ground as we get older, much less deliberately doing something we avoid at all costs: suddenly meeting the Earth on gravity’s terms. But what if we started as children and then... just didn’t stop?
Feedback
Make the bed—done.
Put all the dishes away—done.
Write a page—done.
Mow the lawn—done.
I haven’t been out for a run in far too long, and I’ve been beating myself up about it lately. But I’ve also noticed that as stress-relief goes, having some physical evidence that follows the effort, some clear visual feedback that I’ve accomplished something, is sometimes just as good. Seeing is believing.
Replay
A few years back my wife mentioned she wanted our big terra cotta planter moved from the kitchen out to the garage. It was about 2.5 feet in diameter, 2 feet tall and full of dirt. Lots and lots of dirt. One evening, I thought I’d move it by myself.
Anyway, the only way I could really move it was to grab the rim of the planter between my thumbs and fingers with a pinch grip, (the same way you might grab a really big piece of cardboard) lift it and unceremoniously waddle toward my destination. I made it through one doorway and then ever so slightly bumped into doorjamb #2. It wasn’t much contact at all, but just enough for me to lose the tenuous purchase I had on the rim. It fell all of 6 inches and broke under its own weight. Somehow I was able to replay the event in my mind mind 2-3 times in less than a second before I fully realized I wasn’t going to be able to catch it in time. Gravity can be a harsh mistress.
The same thing happened to me again today: I didn’t break a planter, but I had the “replay” experience immediately after I broke a pane of glass I was moving. Again, I had the surge of surprise, then anger and the sinking feeling of having broken something, and the instant review of the sound of the glass breaking and the feel of suddenly holding two pieces of glass instead of one. Again with the gravity!
The replay creates a feeling of helplessness. There is nothing I can do to fix either situation and in both cases I recognized the risk beforehand, anyway. I suppose that if I hadn’t been so integral in both events, the replay might help me make sense of what happened—maybe that why our brains do it. If a tree branch falls on us, the replay might help us see or hear something that we hadn’t noticed before. Or maybe it gives our brains a chance to fabricate some additional sign or signal that could help us next time.
But it’s probably most important to realize that if the replay isn’t helping you understand something better, it’s probably not worth watching.
Handle
I’ve been playing around with an idea the last couple of months—something to hopefully try to avoid hand and wrist problems that plague a lot of us who spend an inordinate amount of time at a computer. And it’s a little more fun and less onerous than a purposefully uncomfortable chair.
“Stress balls” are a generally accepted tool for relieving hand and arm tension and also billed as a way to take a break from computer work to prevent repetitive stress injuries. But I feel like they’re limited: they’re typically super-squishy and small enough to be unobtrusive on your desk, which means that they’re one-handed devices. (And sometimes they have annoyingly cheerful messages on them: “Life’s a journey, not a race!” Ugh...)
One of the interesting capabilities of humans is brachiation: the ability to support one’s body by hanging from the hands. We don’t do it much spontaneously, as a species, because we don’t live in trees anymore. (Kids do, and they’re to be encouraged!) Some of us do pull-ups or gymnastics, but most of us simply don’t have a reason to hang from a branch or a bar anymore. Which is too bad, because hand strength is something that’s very useful in everyday life, and hanging from a bar is a great way to develop it.
So, how about a stick? Nothing fancy, just a stick that’s maybe an inch or so in diameter. It could be part of an old broom or mop handle; it could be a hammer handle or a piece of sturdy PVC pipe. It could be a broken branch. Just something small enough that you can get your hand around it, stout enough that you can’t break it and long enough that you can grip it with both hands.
(This one just happens to be oak. “How about you, Jimmie? You an oak man?”) Here’s the cool part: take it in both hands.
Squeeze it. Hard.
Try to bend it. Now bend it in another direction. Hard.
Try to wring it out like a wet towel.
Try to pull it apart. Try to push the ends together.
Now grip it so that your thumbs are pointing the same way and try #1-4 again.
Now grip it with both palms up (thumbs pointing away from each other) and run through #1-4 again...
There are a lot of ways to use this very simple tool while sitting at your desk.
There are times when I want to take my computer mouse in my hand and crush it into a fine powder. (I’m not sure I really could, but it’s a recurring fantasy.) This gives me something else to squeeze so that I don’t have to have awkward conversations with our IT guy. It can sit on my desk, almost completely unnoticed. And I can fidget with it and squeeze/bend/twist/pull it while I’m thinking about how to re-word that email or figure out what order those slides should be in.
Best of all, it doesn’t need any optimistic aphorisms on it. It’s just a goddamn stick. If you make one yourself and it just has to have a label, I would suggest it simply say, “handle”: both in the noun and the verb sense. That’ll get it done.
Shifty by Design
Sitting still or standing still all day, every day isn’t great for us—it’s nearly as bad (maybe worse) as only performing one kind of movement all day, every day. So I’ll propose an idea that’s sure to be unpopular: getting rid of desk chairs.
Before you run to the garage to get your pitchforks and torches, let’s talk about this a little. We need to be able to sit down; I did say just a couple sentences ago that standing still is bad, too. But comfy chairs aren’t the answer. (Uncomfortable chairs might be the answer, but that’s not quite what I was thinking of.)
One of the smartest things I’ve read in a long time granted permission to watch as much TV as you like, as long as you don’t sit on any of your furniture. If you’re on the floor, you’ll be changing your position, shifting around and constantly trying to get comfortable: frequent movement and posture changes.
For most Western computer operators like myself working at fairly traditional companies, sitting on the floor probably isn’t going to go over well. (Maybe at Google—maybe they’ve got this already?) But a raised platform with a footprint that’s a bit bigger than a desk chair could create the same effect and have a much more acceptable appearance. One could sit on it using any number of positions found in different countries and cultures, as well as the Western tradition.
There could be several heights or an adjustable height mechanism, naturally, and it could be used with normal height and standing desks. It would have a simple, cushioned surface on top: not too austere, but not too plush. Just enough to keep you shifting in your seat and prompting you to stand up once in a while and move around a little.
And it could have storage underneath the seat! Storage! Nothing more American than that.
The Gentle Pull of Reality
Research on space missions that require astronauts to endure weightlessness for extended periods of time is giving us an interesting picture of how our bodies cope (or don’t) with low or no gravity. The bones of astronauts tend to become less dense because they don’t need to support nearly as much weight/force as they do on Earth. The muscles lose mass for the same reason. And not just the muscles that get us out of our chairs, but heart muscle mass, too: the blood in our body is easier to pump when there’s no downward pull to fight. Humans just seem to deteriorate in a weightless, effortless, floaty environment. The research is important for helping us develop ways of keeping the astronauts healthy during these long missions in Earth orbit, or for another Moon mission or maybe even to Mars.
The effects of weightlessness can be mitigated somewhat by using some special exercise devices, but for really long trips a constant, gentle pull of artificial gravity is probably needed to keep the body functioning properly. Don’t want our brave men and women to come back from Mars looking and moving like rubber chickens...
And if you look at the research from a slightly different angle, it gives us clues about how to stay healthy during our everyday, normal mission of living on Earth. Gravity and effort don’t hold me down or hold me back—they quite literally hold me together.
Full Swing
I chopped down the old-fashioned lilac. It was probably 50 years old and had become diseased and scraggly. I started out by using a hand saw to take down the smaller trunks around the periphery and then got to the four main old-growth trunks in the center. I needed better access to one of the trunks, so I took an axe to it. There is something oddly congruent, if not quite poetic, about cutting down a tree with a wood-handled axe.
Lilac is either a fairly hard wood or it could be that I haven’t sharpened my axe. In any case, I was working low to the ground, so bending at the knees is required for each swing. But then as I established a feel for this specific task/target it encouraged a bit more force and I found myself really laying into it. I don’t often have permission or occasion to do something as hard as I can, so it’s a kinesthetic treat. The rhythm I adopted was structured by the technique: chambering my arms up past my right shoulder, axe well behind me, spine twisted to the right and legs mostly straightened: coiled clockwise. Then dropping my weight by bending at the knees, sinking my hips and returning my shoulders toward the trunk as my arms pull down at an angle to land each blow at about a 45 degree angle to the trunk. Every muscle involved, producing force to either move or stabilize a body part; continuous feedback from my eyes coordinating the strikes.
If you pay attention, you can feel your body do all these things more or less automatically. You simply run out of strength if you only use your arms to do the work, so if you’re intent on getting the job done, the rest of you gets involved whether you realize it or not.
It’s a gift to be able to bring our whole body to a task, even if it isn’t quite as vigorous or ballistic. Feeling so many different sensations and forces, hands and eyes coordinated—no, more than coordinated: unified. A few moments of flow in a vigorous movement. How often do we get to use our entire body to do something like that?
Clarity
Clarity might only arrive afterward: after you’ve done the work.
After you’ve written the email/article/book and revised it and sent it. After you’ve cooked the meal and re-seasoned it and eaten it with your family or guests. After you’ve started the workout and tweaked it and finished it.
Getting there is a pain in the ass because the silly thing won’t usually just tell you what it wants to be. You have to see what it responds to, what encourages it, what helps it thrive or come alive. It’s drawn to action and activity. It’s curious about what you think it is—or what it could be. It is patient. It may change its mind…
But it won’t even sniff around if there’s no scent to pick up on.
Off Leash
On our walk tonight, my wife and I came across a woman walking her cat, off-leash—a beautiful grey tabby. We have 2 cats—neither of them well-behaved enough to be outside at all, much less taken for an untethered walk.
Cats are tricky creatures. They purr and sleep and look cute. To be sure, some are more social or affectionate than others but they are, I believe, wild animals that have fooled us into thinking we need to take care of them.
They form routines and habits that are difficult to break, they effortlessly resist training of any kind, and their instinct to stalk and hunt is always just beneath the surface; just one slow blink away.
The grey tabby may have been taking her owner for a walk. Good for both of them.
“Blocks” of Writing, Moving and Eating
“I don’t feel like exercising” is the movement equivalent of writer’s block.
Caveat: if your exercise of choice is something stupid or you absolutely hate it, please choose a different exercise/activity. Just sayin’: you will never see me at a spin class.
If you started moving just a little bit—y’know, put on some athlesiure wear and walk over to the thing where you do your thing—it wouldn’t feel awful. You’d be OK. If you then did your exercise of choice slowly, even half-assed, it wouldn’t be a big deal and it probably wouldn’t feel awful. (Note that at this point, you have already won) If you kept at it for 5 minutes or so, you might even start to get into it. (Again: winning) From here on out, it’s simply a matter of degree: on a scale of 1 to Captain America, how do you feel? Some workouts just don’t feel that great. Most are, by de!nition, average. You get a couple here and there that make you feel like a tiger. It’s all on a continuum.
The Russians have a saying, “Appetite comes with eating.” They’re on to something: they’re called appetizers. An eating warm-up, as it were...
Stand in the Place that You Work
(Sorry, I couldn’t resist REM lyrics for this)
I’m very lucky to have a desk at work that raises and lowers so that I can either sit or stand, depending on what I’m doing or how I’m feeling. My home office, however, has a simple table and chair, so I have to get up in order to move around and stretch throughout the day.
What I’m coming to appreciate more and more is that if I stand at my desk (or anywhere else), I’m always moving a little bit. I’m shifting my weight from side to side or twisting a little at the waist or maybe doing a little back bend to help straighten up a bit more. Sitting down discourages most movements below the waist–otherwise you’d risk standing up or falling out of your chair. Standing affords the opportunity to move in a lot of other ways more quickly, without having to get up out of a chair first. I can even squat down, bend at the hips, stand on one leg or hop up and down on the balls of my feet—so many options are there, at the ready, because standing is a much more mobile position than sitting.
This experience highlights one of the concepts that Katy Bowman talks about in her book Move Your DNA: it’s not that standing is any better than sitting: it’s that any stationary position is worse than almost any movement.
Three Keys
Breath is life: breathing is the most important movement we have some control over.
Movement—mindless movement, movement that requires attention, concentration and effort, big or small, gentle or vigorous—helps the mind to see things more clearly. Mostly by taking our minds off of whatever our minds are doing and letting our body mind us.
Writing refines thinking.
Breathe, move, write, repeat.
Just Hanging Out
We’ve got a pull-up bar at home. It’s nothing fancy—just one of those contraptions that cantilevers on the door frame so you can put it away when company comes over.
I usually only take the opportunity to use it on the weekends, but ever since I’ve been working from home, I find myself doing a few pull-ups here and there sometimes when I pass by. It’s a little activity that feels good when I’ve been sitting at my computer for a while. My wife likes to hang from it for a few seconds because it helps her to stretch out her shoulders and spine a bit.
If I ever go back to the office, I don’t think I’ll need one at my desk, but it might be nice to have some of these around the office. Maybe in doorways or maybe there’s a tasteful way of incorporating bars to hang from into some of the hallways or the break room. We don’t have any problem with people leaning on tables or sitting on chairs whenever they feel like they need to take a load off their feet. Hanging from a bar, even if your feet never leave the ground, would be a similar solution to the problem of relieving tension and pressure from your back and hips.
Ritual
As I’ve mentioned before, I like my coffee ritual. A recent HBR interview with Mike Norton helps to explain part of why I like it so much, and why we might find ourselves engaged in rituals. Regarding what’s important about rituals, he says, “What seems to matter is that you name it as a ritual, and that you actually do the ritual and don’t just think about doing it.” (Emphasis mine)
This, for my particular interests, is the single most important sentence in the article for what it suggests: our physical movements, our deliberate, thoughtful movements are what help us grieve, help us heal, help us keep going. Mindfully enacting a ritual, no matter how contrived, is more powerful than simply thinking about it, or perhaps even watching it. There are, somehow, powerful forces at work within us during rituals—mental and emotional—beyond those needed to simply move our limbs.
A Push and a Pull
My jujutsu instructors would remind us frequently that every effective technique has a push and a pull. Only pushing against a joint for a lock or a throw can get you most of the way there, but it’s clumsy and requires too much force. Only pulling on your opponent’s body, whether his limb or his uniform is simply futile most of the time. Ideally, both forces need to be applied with the correct timing to produce the desired effect.
I think the same concept is useful to help solve the problem of how we might re-embody our lives: technology is the push, design is the pull.
Technology has been used to make things nearly effortless. Driving my Honda CRV is nothing like driving the '65 Ford pickup my grandpa had. (And I don’t want to give up the improvements in safety...) Driving the '65 Ford required engagement and effort due to the manual steering and manual transmission. I think we’re at a point now where we could allow the user to select a little more resistance in the steering and I know that some cars allow you to enter a mode where you “shift manually”. We have riding lawnmowers, of course, and almost all of the walk-behind models are self-propelled. But what if those devices were re-engineered so that a moderate amount of effort was required to use them?
The second example doesn’t sound very appealing, does it? I think that’s where design comes in: inviting the user to play. Take, for example the Qwerkywriter USB keyboard:
It’s retro, yes, but it has 2 knobs! And a carriage return lever! The knobs and carriage return lever can be programmed to do different useful things—they’re not just quaint decorations.
These are just a couple of quick examples to illustrate the larger principles: we can change the way that work shapes us by re-engineering our tools to require a little more physical work and making the design attractive enough to outweigh the perceived inconvenience.
Redesign the effort and invite people to play: a push and a pull.
Body of Knowledge
Our brains are physical things and the place where most of us locate our minds and certainly our thoughts. There’s growing evidence and a lot of work around the idea that thinking is “embodied”, which is to say that our physical body—our whole body, not just our brainparts—influences and takes part in our thoughts.
Activities like walking and working with your hands can help you to think. “Taking a break” by doing some “mindless” task, like washing the dishes for the 4th time today, because somehow being at home all the time creates dirty dishes beyond all proportion, can sometimes lead to breakthroughs in problem solving. Some might say that the mind is working in the background while you wash dishes; proponents of embodied cognition (fancy nerd-speak) might say that you’re simply bringing your body to bear on the problem as well as your brain.
I’m not really sure how it all works, but consider this: if thinking is helped or changed by our body then perhaps our knowledge is, too. When we know things “in our bones” or we have a “gut feeling” about something, it might not be just in our head. Maybe our bodies know something we don’t.
I Wish More of Our Tools Looked Like Hammers
I grilled out tonight. I spatchcocked a chicken and it turned out pretty nice: juicy meat and crispy skin. It’s hard to beat the flavors you get from a charcoal grill. All the tools I used for preparation had handles. You know, for your hands: a shears for cutting out the backbone, a spatula, a tongs, a knife.
A handle is necessary for doing physical work, for manipulating objects and exerting force. Information and digital representations don’t really respond to force, so I guess that’s why phones and tablets and laptops are designed for our pockets and desks and backpacks.
I miss hammers sometimes. What would it take to make more of our problems look like nails, so we could use hammers more often?
Yoga is Wasted on the Young
Well, not wasted, exactly. It’s certainly an enjoyable and beneficial activity in more than one way at any age.
But you really need to be in your 40’s to fully appreciate being given permission (and instruction) to indulge in the luxurious act of moving your body and assuming postures with such care.