Thursday, August 10: Nature and Indoor-itis

NATURE
Our nature is to be in this body thing, and this body thing needs to move. The is where Feldenkrais started all his examinations, with the understanding that life is movement: without movement, no sex, parents, no us; without life, no feeding, no life, no us; without movement, no fight or flight, which sounds nice when you think of the world picture, but if you just come back to sticking up for something you believe in ( hopefully something worthwhile, like the right of people to say what they think, rather than My Country Right or Wrong) and getting away from a city that is about to be swallowed up in a hurricane.

The four F’'s. And human beings evolved in the woods and the forests and on the plains and ice sheets and jungles and sea shores, but wherever it was we evolved outdoors. And we are in grave danger of losing connection with all that as we spend so much of our life indoors.

This is one reason rarely mentioned that it is so fine to ride a bicycle or walk to the next place: you have to be outdoors to do it. You aren’t in a moveable cave called a car, cut off from nature as you move from one box (house box, say) to another box (office box, or shopping box, or even meeting to protect the environment being held in another box).

We evolved in the out of doors and now it has gotten so weird that people go from their house box to their car box to drive to the gym box, where they supposedly work on getting themselves in shape. In shape for what? To look good in their bedroom box, so that first F will be a bit sprightly? Or are they huffing and puffing away in the gym box to burn off calories of the junk food they put into their mouths, or are they under fear for their health, less they have to spend time in the hospital box? What a weird way to live, so cut off from the human body, even when pretending to be “getting in shape.”

Surely the mind needs to get back into the shape of realizing how sweet and beneficial being in the real sunshine is, breathing the real air, walking with our own two legs, or moving freeing with our own two legs on a bicycle. Of course, we might have to balance on a bicycle and if we have lost our ability to balance, what are we going to do? Hunker down in front of the Television and pretend that this is living. Hobble to our car box to go to a job in an office box looking at a computer box, and forget what it is like to dance and hop and skip and swim and ride a bike?

Alas, this disconnection from nature and our destruction of the world by our car driving and our buying of stuff we don’t need and our approval of endless projects that we are hoodwinked into approving in the name of progress, this is all going hand in hand, don’t you think?