Let It Snow
It snowed pretty hard today, so after work this evening, we went out to our driveway to shovel. Occasionally, throughout the day, you could hear the city plows in the streets and see the private snow removal trucks clearing out driveways.
Snow removal is a very different problem to solve than other outdoor maintenance. A lawn can be mowed a day or two earlier or later without much impact, and fertilizer or aeration can easily vary by a week or two. The weather has to be accommodated, in any case, but usually during the warmer months the timing isn’t terribly critical. This is not the case with more than 1 or 2 inches of snow, especially if there are to be especially frigid temperatures shortly afterward. Pretty much everyone needs their driveway or parking lot cleared out within the span of a few hours, residences and businesses alike.
It makes me wonder: when we finally go back to the office a couple of days each week, would a group of us be willing to take up shovels against the snowy sidewalks and parking lots? For the benefit of a faster response than the snow removal service, the fresh air, the exertion and maybe even camaraderie?
Playing On And Around
Growing up, we we would bring our household garbage to a metal dumpster. It was parked at the end of our long-ish gravel driveway, a few feet away from the group of three mailboxes that seemed to form the nexus of the three households in our strangely-formed little neighborhood.
Sometimes the dumpster would get nearly full and our parents would have us climb up into it (perhaps giving us a boost at first?) to stomp down the garbage so we could fit in whatever else we still needed to throw away.
Being an avid reader even at an early age, I couldn’t help but notice the stickers on the dumpster that read, “Do Not Play On or Around”. Pointing this out didn’t seem to raise anyone’s level of concern, apart from perhaps wanting me to finish my task quickly, discretely and without mentioning any more potential safety hazards.
Even if I hadn’t considered the conflicting interests of my parents and the lawyers at the dumpster company, I think I knew intuitively that I was getting away with something. I was engaging in behavior that wasn’t completely sanctioned; even as I was directed by the highest authority I could think of, apart from the police and the President of the United States. It had a whiff of adventure; a fleeting detour from the rules.
But underneath that, I think the pleasure came from the sheer physical novelty: climbing up something that wasn’t a ladder or a tree; getting into something that wasn’t a bed or a swimming pool; walking on a completely different terrain than I could find anywhere else in my neighborhood. It was fun pulling myself up over the edge of the giant metal box and stomping around on the trash bags, cardboard and whatever else it was that got thrown away in the 70’s and 80’s instead of being recycled or up-cycled or sold on eBay.
As I got older, taking out the garbage and stomping it down when necessary became a dull chore, of course. But learning something new like ice skating or doing a cartwheel or swimming might be just as invigorating and won’t get strange looks from the neighbors.
Tickled
It’s hard to tickle yourself; you can’t, really. You can’t introduce enough unpredictability into your own movements to be surprised in the way that feels ticklish. You know exactly what you’re going to do before you even do it, and that ruins the feeling.
I think there is an analogy here with food, because it seems like it usually tastes better when someone else makes it for you than if you make it yourself. It could be that in the process of making even just a PB&J, you become a little desensitized to the smell of it, or the effort somehow dilutes the flavors. It could be that making the food yourself somehow partially satisfies your hunger.
And it could also be that making food for someone is simply a gift; a nice, little surprise. And who wouldn’t be tickled by that?
Startling
Our oldest cat has become quite deaf. She sleeps very, very soundly. She no longer looks at us when we call to her and she seems completely oblivious when we make noises behind her. She has developed a maddening habit of standing directly behind us when we’re working in the kitchen. Interestingly, the only cat I have ever been truly afraid of was deaf: a pure white longhair named Claire.
Occasionally, when Claire’s owners were out of town, we would look after her, along with their other pets: 3 other cats and 4 dogs. Claire had this habit of hiding in the basement ceiling rafters. I would walk downstairs to take care of the litter boxes and she would, inexplicably, hiss at me from her semi-concealed position in the darkness directly above me, scaring the living hell out of me. My hands and shoulders would shoot up instinctively to protect my head as I jumped sideways away from the lethal threat, landing in a fighting stance. I may have shouted something rather shocking. Every. Single. Time.
We use sounds a lot for just relaxing now, but every sound in the natural world is potentially important survival information. Noises alert us to potential danger—they prepare us for movement. Quiet can perform a similar function, like when crickets and frogs suddenly become silent whenever a predator or other large animal approaches: it’s definitely a good idea to look around and see what’s going on.
Claire’s owners said that she also had a tendency to knock over anything and everything on the counters and ledges she walked on. We get feedback in the form of sound and noises almost every time we move: we can hear the sound of a glass as we slide it across the table, the floor creak as we walk across it, a fork when we accidentally knock it off the table. We can hear the change in the sound of our footfalls when we walk over different surfaces or as we get tired and our running technique degrades. If you’ve ever worn hearing protection like ear plugs or ear muffs that attenuate sound significantly, you might have even noticed that you feel just a tiny bit clumsy. We get a tremendous amount of feedback from how our movements feel as we perform them, but any baseball player or golfer will tell you that the sound of their performance speaks volumes as well.
Poor Claire was deaf from an early age. She was rather high-strung and probably took to the rafters because she didn’t like being constantly surprised by the other household pets “sneaking up on her”. And she might not notice knocking something breakable off the counters and ledges because she wouldn’t ever be startled by the noise.
I’m glad that our old cat is still very affectionate and comfortable enough in our home that she doesn’t feel like she needs to hide. And I’m really glad that she’s too old to get up to the rafters.
Bodies in Motion
There is something about the swing of a pendulum or the sweep of a second hand. You know that there is a machine at work, but it’s still relatable. After all, we’ve chosen to call the pointy things on analog clocks “hands”, not “pointers” or “indicators”. (I might have chosen to call them “arms”, since they’re much longer than they are wide, but no one asked.) Those kinds of clocks have faces, too.
Lots of things have anatomical names: tables and chairs have legs and a back (OK, everything seems to have a back—it’s usually on the other side of the front), hammers and nails have heads, bread can have a heel, bolts can have shoulders and roofs can have hips. It’s easy to think that when we needed to name these parts or features, perhaps the thing that came to mind was the body part it reminded us of. Everybody knows what an elbow is, so if you’re looking through a pile of plumbing parts…
Digital clocks are minimalist information displays: compact and efficient. Four or six digits that change abruptly, a little punctuation and maybe an “AM” or “PM”. No second hand, whether a continuous sweep or discrete movement. No movement through space, however confined, to trace the passage of time. No face, no hands—no features that I would be tempted to name after a part of my body or anyone else’s. (No, “colon” doesn’t count. And stop giggling.)
We have an intuitive grasp of mechanical movements, since we are very much physical beings, and we can often imitate them. We have an appreciation for the qualities of acceleration and speed, precision and tempo because we recognize them as desirable.
But a mechanical clock or analog gauge isn’t an organism. It’s something less than a tree, but something more than a carefully placed stick casting a shadow on the ground. It’s sophisticated and tangible, and we can see something of ourselves in its features and behavior, even if we have no need to name it.
Unclear
I heard the owls tonight on my walk; low and quiet, but persistent. Impossible to see them in the trees, of course. I continued onto the dark trail that goes through the woods. It hadn’t been cleared, but the snow was packed down along a path—difficult to see, since it was just as white as the rest of the snow. I felt my way along the length of it, gently weaving within the bumpy, shallow rut. And I saw the silhouettes of 3 or maybe 4 animals far off in one of the snow-covered fields. (Deer? Must have been.) I paused for a couple of minutes to see if they might come closer, but they kept their distance and I finally realized further waiting was pointless.
It’s frustrating to not be able to see things clearly. Holding still is helpful to both see and hear small details, but the walk was the point. I needed to feel the exertion and the cold night air after too many hours of sitting still and trying to see a clear way through a complex set of technical issues at work. I didn’t have a solution when I got back, but I did have the feeling that any movement along a narrow path would be helpful.
Adjustments
When you’re cutting up vegetables or meat and you need to adjust to get a different angle or position, you can move three things:
the knife
the food
your body
The knife moves, of course, as you make the series of cuts along a piece of food. Some small adjustments can be made, but mostly you want the knife to stay in the same area—where your grip is sure and your hand and wrist are comfortable. Where you can confidently control the knife; where you can make smooth and efficient strokes. Think of working your way down a carrot.
Moving the food instead of the knife is necessary when you’re finished with one piece and grab another (duh), or when the cut requires a knife angle that you can’t easily or safely accommodate. Think of dicing a potato or an onion.
Moving your body is usually reserved for big or awkward tasks that don’t lend themselves well to moving the food. But it’s not because you need to change the grip on the knife, necessarily. It’s more likely because you need to see the food better and it might be simpler to move yourself than move the food. Think of moving around to cut up a pork shoulder or getting yourself over the top of a large squash to slice it in half.
Knife, food, eye. Put another way: tool, problem, perspective.
A Chance Encounter
This year, all of the meetings have moved from a conference room to a laptop screen. When things get back to normal (whatever that is), I assume that many of those meetings will move back into a conference room.
What if, in the meantime, the conference room changed? In fact, what if the conference room changed frequently?
We’re used to the long table and the chairs and the screen at one end of the room. But what if we took it upon ourselves to change the physical space that we meet in periodically? What if, instead of chairs and a conference table, there was suddenly a bunch of high-top tables for groups of 4-5 people to stand at? What if there was a long, low table and cushions on the floor for sitting on? What if there was no table and just the cushions?
Granted, there are obstacles to this, both cultural and logistical. You’d need space to store the extra furniture and who among us (Westerners, anyway) wouldn’t feel a little indignant at having to sit on the floor?
But the variety of sitting and standing postures that we (again, I mean mostly Westerners) so desperately need to regain a little mobility and flexibility would increase. There would certainly be a little discomfort at first, but a little discomfort might also encourage everyone to honor the scheduled stop time for once.
And it just might be fun to see what the meeting room looks like when you arrive this time.
Movement is Life: Part II
The primary function of our brain is to keep our body alive, which it does mainly by moving it around. From digestive movements to blinking our eyes to beating our heart to moving our arms and legs in pursuit of something to eat, our brains manipulate our bodies in the service of survival.
In times of stress, we often feel the need to do something, even when there’s nothing to be done. The British, among other cultures, have created a lovely ritual to address this situation: putting the kettle on and making tea. Movement is important if for no other reason than to give us a feeling of agency and to ward off feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. Action is an antidote to anxiety.
If we are helpless or restrained when our safety is threatened, we might feel worse afterward than if we had been able to act. After all, our brains are responding with the same chemical and metabolic response whether we can actually move or not: it’s giving us the best chance for survival by getting ready to fight or to flee or to get help or any number of other actions. It takes longer for the adrenaline to wear off and we don’t feel the same sense of accomplishment if we can’t use our bodies to address the emergency at all—whatever action it is that we feel would be best.
A comforting and intriguing phenomena is that even long after an experience of helplessness, one can diminish persistent negative feelings about the event by using the body to enact a successful response: to rescript the scene without the constraints. To move and act and feel that sense of completion that was missing. To let the brain save the body by moving it.
Movement is life.
On Foot
A heavy, wet, sticky snow fell and we went out and walked in it that night: slushy and slippery. The temperature dropped over the next two days and we walked again: alternately icy, soft and crunchy, depending on what had happened to that patch of ground over the previous 48 hours.
We walked to the bridge where we first saw Cody and managed to spot her again in the fading light, swimming back and forth in a zig-zag pattern further downstream from the bridge than before. The light doesn’t really fade when there’s this much snow on the ground and clinging to the trees: everything just becomes a light gray with the dark accents of leeward tree trunks and branches.
Cross-country skiers, pedestrians, dogs and deer all left tracks in the snow and ice on the path. Our feet crunched and squished and slipped along, and our feet felt the sharp edges of the hard ice, even through our shoes. And they felt the gentle, frictionless contours of the slippery spots. And they felt the fresh snow compacting under them where nothing had yet stepped, stomped or skied.
Of course, it’s slower going over this unplowed path; more effort. More tension in all the supporting and stabilizing muscles of the ankles, legs, hips and abdomen; and more attention to seeing where our feet might find themselves next. Our eyes examined and perhaps selected each step. Our feet told us what conditions were really like “on the ground” and informed our perspective on when and how to take the next step.
Our hands tell us what we have, but our feet tell us where we stand.
Open Invitations
Moving the pen across paper—just doodling—or typing a few words is an invitation to sketch or write. A little light stretching or walking is an invitation to exercise. Cutting up one raw fruit or vegetable is an invitation to cook.
Small, easy movements are polite, warm gestures to even more engaging activities.
Hand to Mouth
Sometimes it’s hard to find the words to express something. Or sometimes there’s so much to say it feels like you should rush to get it all out. I think I move my hands more in both cases, turning my palms up to juggle imaginary balls or trying to turn a large dial that isn’t there.
It’s one thing to have a casual conversation, but it seems like more of the body gets more involved when things get interesting or difficult to describe. It’s like we want to try to grasp it physically with our hands—to take it apart, spread it out, turn the pieces over.
Like it would somehow be more efficient, more expressive if we could just take hold of it and let our hands tell our mouths what to say.
Movement Is Life
You may have heard the phrase, “Movement is life” in the film World War Z or somewhere else where its meaning has to do with the importance of mobility in a theater of operations: moving to safety, finding resources, joining allies, etc. Being stuck in one place too long can lead to being dead for any number of reasons. (I found that it’s actually part of a longer quote attributed to Jules Verne: “Movement is life; and it is well to be able to forget the past, and kill the present by continual change.”)
In any case, the phrase holds true over a range of more mundane situations and contexts as well. When the occasional sharp or heavy object gets fumbled in the kitchen, I think of another aphorism, “Quick feet are happy feet.” And these days being alert and responding appropriately to how close you are to someone else while shopping or passing through a doorway probably helps a little, too.
Movement in the form of anything from vigorous activity to pleasant stretching promotes health and longevity because we’re animals; not houseplants. Our whole body, including our brainparts, just work better when we engage in a wide range of movements on a regular basis.
And, of course, as many of us know from sitting through hours of either Zoom meetings or remote schooling or simply doing work at a computer, prolonged stillness contributes to that nearly irresistible urge to nod off. Movement is wakefulness.
Taking the Appropriate Steps
Stairs are a tricky business. When you start climbing a set of stairs, it only takes your body 2 or 3 steps to “learn” how far it is from one to the next. The spacing is quickly adapted to, which is why, I suppose, OSHA has a limit of 1/4” of variation in riser height. A small but sudden departure from evenly spaced treads can be a significant hazard and contributor to falls. Anyone who has mistakenly believed that there was one more or one less step has had a kind of near-death experience related to this phenomenon.
Obviously, it isn’t that we need perfectly flat ground or perfectly even stairs to survive in the natural world. We got along fine with the natural terrain of rocks and riverbanks and slopes for a long time before stairs or escalators were developed; we simply had to pay attention and exert ourselves. It’s that a regular pattern is easy to identify and our body quickly figures out how to put itself on auto-pilot for efficiency: there’s no benefit to investing extra effort where it isn’t obviously needed.
We fall when we mistakenly perceive the steps to be even and they are instead off by more than 1/4” or so. For our safety, the distinction must be as sharp and obvious as going from one stair tread to the next: the path must either be noticeably irregular and unpredictable or utterly monotonous. But for our humanity—our animal agency—we need uneven terrain to engage our senses and challenge our balance.
P.S. Cats instinctively know that we are most vulnerable when we are carrying a basket full of laundry on the stairs and frequently make attempts to assassinate us there by suddenly appearing underfoot.
Two Kinds of Careful
If a knife is really sharp, you have to be very careful with the edge: it’s going to efficiently cut whatever it touches. If a knife is really dull, you have to be very careful with the pressure you’re exerting: it’s going to be difficult to stop if the blade slips off to one side or it suddenly plunges through.
The first kind of careful requires you to be attentive and skillful.
The second kind of careful demands much more of both.
Floor Massage
Just roll around on the floor, like a baby or a little kid. Curl up in a ball or reach way out with your arms and legs. Twist and flex on your back or your front. (If you’re not careful, you might end up accidentally doing some yoga, but that’s OK.)
It’s nice to feel how solid the floor is. It gives you a pretty good massage and stretch at the same time. It does so without being pushy or tedious—it’s an even match for your weight.
And your pets or kids will probably think it’s hilarious and join in.
Transitions
The other day on a walk, we saw a muskrat swimming along the banks of a creek as we walked over the bridge. We’d never seen a muskrat there before and stopped to watch it for a while. It swam under the bridge we stood on and then pulled up to the bank and started nosing around, looking for… something? It wasn’t obvious.
Anyway, Cody (a fantastic name supplied by my wife) slipped back into the water and swam upstream a bit more, then back onto the bank, then back into the water and toward us again. Cody seemed equally at home in the water and on land. There was no hesitation or preparatory movements for making the transitions, even though it naturally required a change in posture and head tilt to go between swimming and walking. The forces on her legs and body are very different in the two environments (if they are in fact distinct) as are the movements themselves. But Cody gave no indication that anything changed—she simply entered and exited the water with the same ease with which we walked from the bike path onto the bridge.
After a while, Cody found and decisively nibbled a tall plant into shorter lengths, discarding the stem sections and taking the longest, leafiest part with her back downstream and onto another part of the bank where we couldn’t see her any longer. The leaves could have been for dinner or a house project. It wasn’t obvious.
Touch Play
We’ve been watching The Queen’s Gambit and it’s reminded me of the “touch move” rule: if you touch a piece you’re obligated to use your turn to move it. It discourages a lot of fiddling around with the pieces, trying out moves before committing to one. The game is perhaps more elegant and disciplined as a result.
What I think is most interesting is the effect that even just touching a piece can have. A player might have visualized—incompletely or inaccurately—a set of consequences and side-effects, but the act of simply reaching and grasping a piece can lead to a sudden realization of how the intended move actually impacts the rest of the board. And how the game could play out differently as a result.
Writing feels like this over and over again. I certainly don’t see the words on the page before I write them. I might hear some of them in my head, but it’s not the same as seeing and feeling them play out onto the page or bubble up onto the screen. Often, even if I have a particular outcome in mind, it simply changes as I write it. Sometimes I’m surprised at what ends up on the page after a “move”.
I’m not sure that chess and writing actually have that much in common. But both require touch in order to discover the outcome and the entire game can change after the first move.
Technology vs. Walking
For a long stretch of human existence, if you went for a walk it was “out of doors”. There just weren’t that many buildings big enough that you could even quicken your step into a run, much less spend time strolling in the same structure. There were castles and cathedrals: exceptions that prove the rule.
Over time, there were bigger and bigger buildings: factories, warehouses, theaters and airship hangars. And eventually department stores. The first indoor mall, Southdale Center Mall, was built in 1956 in Edina, Minnesota: an entire miniature downtown shopping area in a completely enclosed building: no bugs, no wind or rain or dark of night. Certainly no terrain.
To take this one step further, consider the absurdity of the treadmill: a device placed inside a building which helps you simulate the act of walking or running while remaining in place! Biologically, this creates a visuomotor paradox that approaches the grotesque: we’re used to the visual feedback and kinesthetic sensations that come with moving. A treadmill is essentially playing a biomechanical prank on our senses.
Humans are naturally quite well-equipped to walking outdoors, and have gone from having to traverse the landscape as we found it, punctuated with trees, streams, thickets and rocks, to walking along muddy streets and wooden sidewalks, to perfectly smooth, flat concrete and carpet nearly everywhere in a very short period of time, evolutionarily speaking. I think it would seem very odd to someone from the Victorian era that we have so many large buildings that we spend time in, but perhaps they would have thought it sounded very civilized.
Walking indoors is certainly better than not walking at all, but it’s a very recent development and it comes at a cost: it offers predictable comfort at the expense of feeling the wind on your face, seeing the sun and the clouds, feeling warm or chilled, or the chance of seeing wildlife. But mostly it diminishes a certain feeling of agency; of moving through a world that is, in fact, accommodating without being entirely convenient.
Feedback Revisited
Attention to feedback, to what your senses are telling you about what’s happening while you’re moving your arms and legs around, trying to get something done, is the difference between simply following a procedure and mindfully engaging with it.
Sometimes I just want to do the steps and be done. Sometimes I take more enjoyment in observing and feeling the process on the way to the desired result. I suppose with some things I don’t even care about the outcome, I just want to experience the feel of it. The sensations alone are enough.
In any case, the real effort doesn't seem to be in executing each step—it's in paying attention to the feedback and making adjustments as you go. There is real work in both concentrating on the incoming information, which may be quite subtle, and then adapting to it.