Sometimes a question might be as weighty as a statement, but not as dangerous as a statement. When a question is stupid, it’s just a stupid question, but when a statement is stupid, people might hold you accountable and next thing you know is you’re hanging by your neck from a tree, looking at the tips of pitchforks.
Physical movement is like the structure of written text. The letters itself, the straight lines and curves, and how these are arranged into groups, and written line by line, they might even be visually appealing, but for the large part the inking itself is meaningless.
The meaning is somehow connect to, evoked, triggered by the structure. Only known to the writer and the reader. As humans we are constantly searching for meaning. Our souls are searching-for-meaning supercomputers.
The same could be said for spoken words. Even though the sound of someone’s voice might be pleasing, soothing, wonderful to hear, if they are speaking in a language we don’t understand their voice is more or less meaningless. But THERE IS meaning behind the actual sounds. We use speech as a vehicle for meaning.
I close the loop: some Feldenkrais teachers sometimes make it sound like as if there was some sort of mysterious magic behind all those movements. And that the movements themselves are not at all that important. Is that 70ties-style marketing talk? Or is that a way of saying that, much like text and speech, movement has BOTH structure AND meaning?
Garfield, the cat from the American comic strip created by Jim Davis, once said: „There’s no cat behind the cat.” What did he mean by that?
Maybe there’s nothing deeper, nothing more powerful, nothing more important to any person than being able to move well, without discomfort, without pain?
„Movement” as in the vigorous movements of playing sports, in the minimal movements of sleep, the moving in unison with another person, or the pleasures of taking a walk in a group, the movements necessary for your work, for leisure, the movements for chewing food, or the movements for passing stool, or the movements necessary for visual perception, or rolling the eyes, throwing the hands up, speaking, laughing, sending flowers to your mother, or sending a kiss, all the thinkable and unthinkable movements.
Maybe there’s nothing deeper, nothing more powerful, nothing more important to any person than being able to use movement smoothly, as a vehicle for purpose and meaning?
Does movement have both structure and meaning? If true, I could say this: Improve the way you move… and let me throw this one in too: „improve the way you think about movement”, and you will improve your life. True or not?