The questions we ask are the waters we swim in
Henrik is the one who inspired me to get into the winter lake. He lives in Denmark, and every morning, year-round, he gets into Oresund, a bay of the Baltic Sea, and submerges himself up to his chin. He’s a busy man, Henrik. Three kids, runs a company. Like most of us, he struggles to find the time amidst his commitments to devote to his movement practice. Yet he’s dedicated to his daily cold water ritual.
I live on an Alpine lake, could throw a stone in it from my balcony. (Well honestly, I couldn’t. But someone with a stronger arm could.) The lake is the most constant and beloved presence in my environment. There are days when I can’t see the mountains through the clouds. There are times the forest is shrouded from view. But the lake is always there, a ceaseless revelation. More subtle than the moods of an ocean, the lake’s qualities are no less distinct or meaningful. After 5 years here I am still just beginning to decipher the surface of the water. Some days I am completely baffled by the dark tendrils that reflect the sky more bluntly than the other currents. I usually cannot explain why the waves arise suddenly, where they come from, or the reason behind their disappearance. And the tangle of things that wash up on shore are stories written in another language, one of which I can only read a few words. The detritus tells of migrations and seasons, moultings and pollinations, and wind patterns, and time, and fluctuations.
I hate being cold. I will probably never voluntarily take a cold shower. I will probably never drive 20 minutes to a body of cold water to do the cold plunge thing that is so trendy and supposedly beneficial. But here I find myself, and while it is easy to simply enjoy the view of the lake from a comfortable distance and temperature, it seems like not touching it consistently and intentionally, while I can, would be a missed opportunity that I might quietly regret for the rest of my life. So about a year and a half ago, inspired by Henrik, I decided to get in the lake throughout the entire year. If not daily, as least as often as possible.
Now more days than not I put on my suit and a warm hat and walk the 50 meters down to the dock. In summer, it is the people’s lake. Boats dot the surface and paddle boarders glide around languidly. But in the winter, the birds know the lake is theirs. In summer when I jump in they scatter nervously, even though they see me there every day. In winter they don’t bother moving off, and barely give me a glance, if anything. They know my stay will be brief.
When I submerge in winter I don’t follow a system, or a particular protocol. I don’t know the Wim Hoff breathing technique. I am not good at it, or graceful or precious in the execution. I just stand in the water up to my waist until the freezing pain in my legs can be called something else.
It doesn’t matter how busy the day has been (I seem to usually go in the late afternoon) or how tumultuous my thoughts are. In those half-submerged moments something like silence descends, the shock of the cold slices through all distractions and the world that remains is lucent. Of course I am always seeing more or less the same landscape- the ridgeline, the shoreline, the structures in the distance. Yet the variables far outnumber the constancies. Birds are always present, but their formations are singular. Light always falls, but never the same way twice.
After standing there and just arriving into the cold and the sharp realness, I eventually sink down until I’m in up to my neck. At this point I start making strange noises (still get no response from the birds) and I would say that I “notice my breath” but really, it’s not noticing that I’m doing. I’m just filled with breathing, because that is all my body knows how to do when it’s so damn cold. I either stay in place filled with breathing and make strange noises or swim a short way out and back make strange noises, but either way this part is very brief and the best thing about the lake in that moment is getting out of it.
After emerging, the air, regardless of how cold it measures, feels balmy, and I can stand there for a moment and feel the way the body is working to calibrate and adjust. The pungency of the landscapes softens a little in the relative warmth, and the edges blur.
Back inside I bundle up and go about my day. But here’s the interesting thing, and where the questions come in. No matter how much activity I do after I get out (I’ve found it best if I follow the dip with vigorous movement of some kind) it always takes the toes on my right foot a longer time to warm up than the rest of me. They’ve occasionally stayed numb up to a few hours after I’ve gotten out. This indicates to me a problem with circulation in my right leg. If I reflect back I can identify other signs of this, going back as far as 7 years. But it was easy to ignore or misunderstand those previous signs because they weren’t direct enough or causing evident problems at the time. In the past few years I have started to have some chronically strange stuff going on in my entire right leg, from pelvis to ball of the foot. My numb lake toes are now a very relevant part of the puzzle of my leg and are helping direct me to possible solutions.
I needed to get into the winter lake to get this pertinent piece of information. In finding a new way of relating to the environment I could identify a problem. Or maybe more accurately, I could perceive a new angle of the problem.
How do we ask questions of ourselves and the world? I cannot stay in my house all day with warm socks and fully understand my feet. And I cannot understand how my blood circulates without understanding my feet. I need the cold lake to teach me about my feet (and so many other things besides.) I need to put my feet, and the rest of me, into different circumstances, into different waters, in order to encounter troubles my body might be facing in its endless effort to regulate.
I ask a question by going into the winter lake. I don’t expect the answer to be a simple one. It won’t be in the lake, and probably not in the feet either. The answer will be complex and it will reveal relationships nested in relationships nested in relationships. It might take just as long to understand the answer as it does to decode the garlands of grasses and feathers on the water’s edge. But that I’m not only asking the question alone in my warm house is, in itself, an answer for now.
The Problems are the Practice
I don’t usually spend time with the dying, but this week by chance I visited with two people who are in different, but similarly close proximities, to their ends. Of course, everyone I interacted with this week, including myself, is in some proximity to their end, it’s just that these two particular people are more acutely aware of where they stand. One of the people I visited is a dear friend and the other a stranger.
The friend is Ruby, who is in her 70s. She is currently undergoing chemotherapy for un-treatable cancer. The chemo is aimed to simply slow the growth, and Ruby is hoping for a bit more time here. When I visited she was emaciated, though her eyes were still bright. I could see the effort it took for her to sit up and talk with me, so I didn’t stay too long. Ruby is a life-long improviser. She has been studying the improvisational form called Action Theater for decades. I met her through mutual friends and she invited me to periodically teach the small improv group she has been leading for years. I was always impressed and inspired by how open and enthusiastic Ruby was when I taught. She tried everything I suggested, no matter how odd. When I asked her how she is doing she said: “You know, I find I’m doing exactly the same thing I do when I improvise. Notice, experience, respond. Notice, experience, respond. I’ve been practicing that for so long and now I am finding it very useful in this situation. Not reacting, responding.”
I’ve been studying intensively the past few years with Jozef Frucek, founder of Fighting Monkey Practice. He has given me a whole new angle from which to consider problems. He finds it a valuable asset when a movement practice reveals a problem. I admit that at first I found this hard to understand. Aren’t we practicing in order to feel better? Don’t we want to avoid problems? If my knee hurts after I do a particular practice, shouldn’t I just stop doing that practice? After hearing Jozef elaborate on this topic though and experimenting with the theory in my own way I have found my entire concept of problems has transformed. In practice, but also in life. If we are always steering ourselves away from problems, eventually our world becomes so small that we find we have very few options still open to us. I have assimilated Jozef’s perspective on problems and I now believe that interacting with the problems offers us possibilities to expand our horizons.
There is a whole panoply of choices we face when a problem arises in our movement practice, or in life. The proposition is that the problems are the practice. The proposition is to engage with the problems, and the details of how we engage is the specific research. We can cease the behavior that triggered the problem. We can ignore the problem and continue as we were. We can modify the behavior in any number of ways- intensity, duration, scale, timing, just to name a few. We can repeat the behavior in different situations to test for any corresponding factors. We can gather more information. We can ask questions. We can compare our past experiences with present ones. We can deconstruct the behavior to find out more precisely where the problem originates. We can examine our intentions behind doing the behavior in the first place. We can experiment with alternative pathways to the same goal. We can project into the future what we want our behaviors to be like and work backwards to a solution that is long-term in scope. And on and on and on.
None of the above are categorically correct responses. It always depends, and what it depends on also depends. Sometimes I have found the very best way to handle a problem is to ignore it, though that defies any common sense. Other times I choose instead to turn directly toward the problem, to move towards it as if it were a valuable and curious thing that deserves my full attention. I never know which strategy is best or will yield the desired results. But when I consider that the benefit of practice lies in exactly this endless investigation, just as much or even more than in any purported result such as health or strength or range of motion, I am gifted instantly with an extraordinarily rewarding practice.
This is not to say we should seek out problems. We don’t need to, obviously. They are always arising. When we work with the body, particularly the aging body, which means all of our bodies, we will inevitably encounter pain or discomfort or strange sensations. My Shifu says “Those who practice to be strong will always be weak. Those who practice for health will always be sick.” That’s another way of saying that if some perfect state of equilibrium is our goal, we will constantly be disappointed. If, however, our intention is to be able to navigate problems with some degree of curiosity, interest and enjoyment in the process, we will never lack material to work with and ironically we may find ourselves more engaged and contented than if we practice with loftier goals.
This is also not to conflate the presence of lots of problems with success. In fact, in researching our responses to problems, we are hopefully avoiding other, bigger problems. We are learning to decode information that may be extremely relevant in helping us avoid greater troubles down the line. Always encountering different problems is one thing. Always encountering the same problem over and over is quite a different thing, and something that deserves close attention. Ideally, the problems themselves will transform. We might think of it as problem-evolving, rather than problem-solving.
Overarching is the meta-work of understanding where our thresholds are. There comes a point when a problem is overwhelming, and at that point, regardless of which strategy we use we will be beyond the zone of fruitful investigation. When we are stretched too far beyond our capacity, our ability to grow and learn from what we are facing shrinks drastically and once again our horizons close in.
A student of mine recently told me that an exercise I taught her made her feel incredibly dizzy, nauseous, and feeling something like rage. “Ohhh interesting!” I said. “Let’s figure out what’s going on!” We spent some time breaking the movement down into components and we identified some different ways she could modify it so that she could experiment and see if she could pin-point what exactly about the exercise was triggering the sensations. After tinkering with it, she still might decide in the end that this exercise is not for her, which is totally fine. Almost no exercise is valuable in and of itself anyway. But that she is interested and willing to investigate is meaningful, more meaningful than the exercise itself, and I believe will provide her with some useful information that she can apply to different areas of her life.
The problem that we all share, the big Problem, is that we are all going to die. Regardless of how much spiritual work we’ve done or what our version of the afterlife looks like, when we get down to it, death is problematic for us to grasp and accept. It maybe seems a bit exaggerated of a claim to say that our movement practices can prepare us for death. But is it really? Ruby has practiced improvisation for so long that now, when she is directly facing the biggest unknown of all, she has the skills to stay aware of herself and her responses.
We know that movement is essential for wellbeing. It is widely accepted that we must keep moving in order to stay vital. But somewhere along the way we have adopted the notion that our fitness will maintain us. This is an illusion. Nothing will maintain us. The best we can hope for is that how we practice moving, or how we practice anything, will teach us how to change with grace and fascination.
The second dying person I met this week is Urs. I went to his apartment to clean for his wife, because she is exhausted from the full time care and the emotional toll of watching her partner die. I met them both for the first time yesterday, bucket and rags in my hand. I vacuumed dust balls out from under his bed. I’ve never vacuumed so carefully. I was afraid I would accidentally jiggle a critical electrical cord loose. It seemed to me that Urs was between worlds. His wife, however, is very much in this world and this world is shifting before her eyes. “I always thought I would go first.” she told me. As I was leaving I expressed my condolences. She said “Es gehört zum Leben.” Meaning, it’s part of life. But more literally translated- it belongs to life.
May we always can
Photo Maria Cheilpoulou
Or, when did we all stop being dancers?
I am not a Grateful Dead fan, yet I owe my life’s path to one particular Grateful Dead bumper sticker. I was in my early 20s, stopped at a light behind a van plastered with stickers. The van’s sticker collection was a survey of pop psychology one liners and the light was long so there was some time to read and reflect upon the pithy wisdoms. “Dance While you Can” advised the Dead. I think there was a picture of a skeleton beside the words. “Yes!” I thought to myself. “Yes, bumper sticker, that is exactly what I am going to do!”
And this is, in fact, what I have done. I am 47 and still dancing professionally. Every time life presents me with a fork, where I could choose to continue to dance, or turn towards something else, I say to myself “Dance while you can.” That is how I continue to dance. Thanks, bumper sticker.
Now I’m going to go ahead and admit something and tell you the secret.
First of all, I am not a particularly talented dancer. I consider this fortunate. Had I been more gifted in the conventional sense I probably would have taken a more pre-scripted track. Instead I owe my curious path in Dance mostly to a series of remarkable encounters.
The secret is that my definition of Dance is big. It’s huge. Take the biggest word you can think of- Life, God, Spirit, Source, Energy, whatever. That’s what Dance means to me. So, with a definition like that it’s much easier to keep dancing than you might think.
It makes me sad that I’m an anomaly. When did something that was once fundamentally human and universal become the purview of the young, the thin, the impossibly flexible and strong, the ones dealt a magical combination of genes, luck and exceptional grit?
As is the case with many young girls, Ballet was my entry way into dance. I started ballet classes at age 4, at my own insistence. My first role on stage was as a cloud. (I love this historical artifact from my life because as it happens, clouds are still very relevant images for me, and something I still dance. I hope I’m never finished researching and trying to move like clouds.) I spent a few years dancing on pointe, and added contemporary dance classes to the mix. At the peak of this phase I was probably dancing 3 or 4 days a week and performing in the bi-annual productions. Even though my teacher of ballet and contemporary was a very cool lady of an experimental leaning I began to sense the restriction of the forms I was studying. I became aware of the latent aesthetics that made us adolescent girls unhappy with our curves, our soft rounded contours. I was also realizing that I definitely didn’t have what it takes to excel in those forms. Here is when the idea (which is the prevalent idea about dance in our culture) began to solidify in my mind. Dance was something available to some, and not to others. You were good at it, or not. You had what it took to be a good dancer, or not. This makes total sense in the context of Ballet. Certainly not every body on earth can move the way that form dictates. It belongs to a privileged few, those with the correct proportions, range of motion, access to classes, etc. The fact that I belonged to the qualifying categories- white, middle class, thin and STILL didn’t feel like I belonged there indicates something.
I gave up dance for awhile and tried many other things. But in University it found me again. It snuck up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder and said “It’s me. I’m not who you thought I was. Come on, let me show you…” Thanks to some phenomenal teachers my definition of Dance got blown open. I tried Capoeira, Contact Improv, Butoh, Congolese, Post-modern and I loved them all. I spent hours getting to know the space behind my sternum, undulating my spine on all fours like a cat pouncing in slow motion. I learned about fundamentals of composition like space and time. I rolled around on the floor feeling the memory of my embryonic beginnings. I learned to go into a kind of trance state by moving from potent images. I improvised on the street, in abandoned New York City buildings, in the library, wherever. Once the constrictions around the definition of Dance were lifted for me I began to realize Dance is everywhere. A metaphor, yes. But more than that, it’s a principle that invites a way of perceiving the world.
This is around the time I had the fateful encounter with the bumper sticker. Approaching the end of University, I was getting some gentle pressure to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. People assumed I would do something with writing, as writing was another big love of mine. But anytime that subject came up I felt a physical unease creep into my body. I couldn’t articulate it yet, but I didn’t want to sit behind a desk and write about the world. I wanted to move in the world. “I’ll write later.” I told myself. I want to dance while I can.
I have seen many extremely talented dancers leave the dance profession for other pursuits. I completely understand why they do this and there is no judgment here. Broken bodies (more on that later,) desire for financial security, wish to start a family, these are just a few of the practical reasons professional dancers stop dancing. In one way or another, these reasons indicate that the field of dance cannot accommodate change- changing bodies, changing priorities, changing needs. But let me ask this- what is change if not a Dance??? Dance is movement with intention. Dance is the capacity to modulate speed, rhythm, to respond to a partner, any partner. That partner could be time, it could be an aging body, it could be the inevitability of change itself. I am deeply disappointed by the narrowness of dance as it is defined, practiced and performed these days. And by these days I mean in the last many hundreds of years.
I suspect the problem began the moment we put Dance on stage. The moment we made it something separate from life, that placed a clear physical distinction between the dancer and observer. This separation created a hierarchy, although who is at the top and who is at the bottom I don’t know. You could say the dancer is at the top, possessing a skill unavailable to others. Or you could say the audience is at the top- consuming an art that potentially damages the bodies of the performers.
There seems to be a myth that associates dance with health as in: dancers take good care of their bodies because their bodies are their instruments. While I am sure there are plenty of healthy dancers, as far as I can tell there is nothing particularly healthy about how dance is currently, professionally practiced. For a dancer to succeed they must, by necessity, push beyond their limits. Developing extreme flexibility requires that we go beyond protective borders of our structure. We have to stop feeling the edges in order to go beyond them. We then lose the ability to feel the significant borders at all, which makes it easier to extend beyond them, and a destructive cycle is enacted. Once a dancer realizes the harm caused by going too far it’s often too late. The feedback comes once the damage has been done.
But because we as a culture have come to associate good dance as being virtuosic, we, as consumer audiences, essentially demand dance to be extreme. We want to see something on stage we can’t do ourselves. Otherwise, what’s the value?
Please understand, I also love to watch dance. I love to be amazed at what the human body is capable of, and to feel the particular mixture of admiration and longing when I see a highly skilled dancer onstage. I just think it’s a tragedy, and not an insignificant one, that such a tiny fraction of the population can say with any confidence “I am a dancer.”
According to my teacher of the Chinese Internal Arts, before there were any forms, like Qigong or Taiji, people danced. It seems as if across cultures, the roots of many of the forms we practice are in shamanic or folk dancing rituals. We humans have always understood the benefit of moving collectively, usually to music. Dancing removes stagnation, supports the efficient flow of fluids and energy in the body, uplifts the spirit, offers transcendent states. Dance could very well be the key to health. How ironic then, that not only is it not a universal practice, but also that it doesn’t necessarily promote health in a large portion of its practicioners. As human culture has grown ever more complex and diversified, and we appear to have become more busy, we have formalized our movement into distinct practices, separate and differentiated from the rest of our life. We know that movement is essential to health, so we dutifully make time for it but it tends to be segregated from everyday life. Dance living on stages instead of in the fields, village squares and other public spaces is just one version of this dis-integration.
This brings me to another bumper sticker/coffee cup/tee shirt that we have all seen. The one that says “Dance like no one is watching.” Okay. I really enjoy dancing like no one is watching. I do it regularly to Rhianna in the kitchen. I advise it, especially for any of us who may feel unconfident in our dancing abilities. But I just want to toss out another possibility. What if we created a culture in which we could Dance as if everyone were watching and furthermore that such an occurrence is NO BIG DEAL. What if we could Dance as if not only is everyone watching, but everyone is clapping and swaying in support, and smiling while they wait for their moment to go? In this imagined utopia, a throwback to a time in our collective evolutionary past, and a reality that still survives in some cultures, we would be doing this on a regular basis and the Dance would be so integrated in our lives that it wouldn’t even need a word at all to define itself. It would just be what we do, who we are.
Because I love Dance and want to continue doing it until I die, until I become the skeleton from the bumper sticker, it is essential for me to actively research a few things.
First, I have to ask how to attend to my aging, changing body. I cannot rely on any particular aesthetics or forms to guide me because I have to allow the expression of Dance to keep changing in response to how I’m changing. I have to keep discovering what is possible and what needs to adapt. Sometimes the adaptation is physical, sometimes it is mental.
Second, I have to continue to look for Dance everywhere. The more examples I can find of what it means to Dance, the more possibilities I have to embody it. So I look for Dance when I watch the ducks crossing the road. I look for it in quirky walks, in ice hockey players, small tunnels of wind and pieces of garbage twisted and forgotten. I figure if I can keep the definition of Dance big enough, there is no way I will ever stop belonging there.
Come on people, let’s dance while we can.
And may we always can.