As I empty the bathtub (at the moment my only option for showering), I keep my feet in the water. The residue of soap and body is easily washed away if I use them to move the water around. Similarly to electric toothbrushes that by fidgeting on my teeth manage to clean better than static ones. I am getting you used to completely baseless theories in my posts so I thought I’d start with one to make you feel at home: does movement clean?
I was opposed to rereading books and rewatching movies, but recently I’m finding pleasure in this repetition. What felt like a waste of time (as if time could be used properly, ha!) now turned into a pleasurable form of consolidation. Noticing what I didn’t before, finding myself in those pages, catching myself in those scenes.
I am introducing loops in my classes. I move through poses (A-B-C-D) and then revert the order to go back ‘home’ (D-C-B-A). Been there, done that. In such an unpredictable world, can’t a woman have some predictability? How nice is walking back from where you came from?
Repeating isn’t really following in your footsteps anyways. It’s just an illusion that facilitates feeling comfortable enough so we can focus on aspects of the journey that are not map-related.
Downward facing dog, lift the right leg, step it forward, twist to the right, place the right hand back down but inside your right foot this time, place the left heel down, lift the left arm towards the ceiling, open towards the left side, straighten the front leg. Good. Now stop. Go back. Triangle. Extended side angle. Easy twist. Runner’s lunge. Three legged dog. Downdog.
See? While you were distracted with predictability things changed name. I was moving the water around.
We don’t have much in this life other than the sequences inside of it. The structure is illusory, the form is temporary, anything we cling on and long for is there for a bit so our gratitude has to be built on crumbly grounds. We’re left with playing and fighting. With pretending we have been here before, so we can ease the response of our senses.
The other day a woman I follow on Instagram said she’s been sober for years. She was assuring non-sober listeners that life is already a trip, a chaotic and psychedelic experience that defies boredom. In our collective (the one where all my Selves get to speak about hot topics in weekly meetings) we discussed this and didn’t find an agreement yet. Some selves were debating the flatness created by the over-availability of things, and I can’t blame them. Others were advocating for the right to encounter chaos and micro-dosing it with their preferred methods, and I certainly can’t disagree with them either. Then there were the ones who had the same opinion of etimofuggente. They added that the only game really worth playing is the one of adding pretenses of sameness. To add that bit of comfort to an intensely unpredictable experience.
As I move the water around I realize cleaning is nothing more than sending filth elsewhere. What I don’t see doesn’t exist. I play with that. To defy the fact that another truth of life, another tragedy and blessing of existing, is that things move around but never evaporate. Nothing disappears.
I move from a pose where I support myself with the left hand to another where I use the right one. I make life easier by pretending that if I shift my focus, only this exists, not the stuff behind my head. It’s another game worth playing.
It’s just a game.
At some point, as we embrace adulthood, we forget we’re still just playing with clay. Not everyone becomes an adult even when they look like one, and the ones who don’t might still forget the rules of playing. They’ll treat clay as clay, they won’t make anything out of it, they will put a label on it so everyone knows what it is and agrees with them on its definition, they’ll never give themselves permission to touch it. They’ll believe things will stay the same when left outside of reach.
Aren’t they just as crazy as the ones who believe a cat made of clay is really a cat?
Perhaps even more.
Empatherapy 