Walking, by Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau would have made a good trail runner. And perhaps a good Buddhist, too. He walked, he said, for at least four hours a day, and liked nothing better than to discover new trails and be something close to lost in the wilderness. He was also an advocate of being in the moment, something which he found much easier in the wilderness than in normal (early American) urban society. He writes like a monk about being “in” his body, and of bringing his mind to stillness and attention.
“If thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is – I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”
I find it easy, when running, to fall into thinking about running, especially as someone just learning how to run more efficiently and softly in minimalist shoes. I often find myself thinking about my form: is my foot hitting softly, on the midfoot? Am I running tall? Where am I looking? Is my stride too long? Too short? Too bouncy? Is my tail bone in the right place?
I don’t think these are bad questions, as far as questions go, but this thinking about myself has a kind of external quality to it, as if the really essential “I” is not the one running, but the one watching myself run. This external I is doing external thinking. It’s almost the same as having, as Thoreau says, thoughts of work running through my head: I am not where my body is. I am not in my body.
When an elephant lifts up his foot, do you think he is thinking about how he looks lifting his foot? I doubt it. He isn’t consciously learning how to lift his foot better, or more efficiently, or more like an African or a Tarahumara marathoner. He, I think, is just lifting it. His intention is solely to lift it and put it down where it needs to go to get the job done. Being that in my body and in the moment is the aim, and I think the idea of intention is key to getting closer to it more often.
Lily has been doing yoga whenever she can recently, and as a result has had a number of different teachers in a short space of time. Different teachers have different areas of focus. One focuses on getting all the breath out: yoga as a kind of “cleaning out” process. Another focuses on core strength, accessing and developing the power in her lower abdomen. It sounds like a decidedly physical process. The other teacher, Janet, is “much more sensual.” You don’t just point your foot at the wall or extend your arm up towards the ceiling; you unfurl, you reach, you caress, you hang, you drag…
This shows, for one thing, the power of verbs. Stephen King, in On Writing, described how important verbs are in good writing. They are expressive and efficient in ways that ordinary verbs plus a string of adverbs aren’t.
It also shows an attitude where intention is the key, not accuracy. Intention is a generative, creative and expressive energy, whereas accuracy can be parsimonious, critical, ungenerous and restrictive.
Lily talks about how Janet has and encourages an attitude of forgiveness. Your motivation, your body, your mind and your emotions won’t be the same every day. Some days you will be stiffer than others, or bloated, or light and flexible or bubbly and energetic. Some days will just be harder, or easier, than others. Forgive yourself for anything you might see as a failure of the spirit or the body. Being tired or sore is not a sin, so be accepting of it. It’s all temporary, anyway; it’s pretty certain that on another day you’ll feel different.
Occasionally, I find the idea of forgiveness tricky. If I truly accept that it’s fine to be the way I am at any particular moment, then what is there to forgive, or hope that others forgive? It can be like having someone come up to me and forgive me for being uncouth and obnoxiously loud and happy with my friends. Sometimes joy can be noisy, youthful and inconsiderate – I’ll grant that – but there have also been times when I’ve wanted the neighbours to turn the Bon Jovi off at two in the morning. But if I went up to those inconsiderately happy neighbours and forgave them, I imagine they’d be slightly confused and offended. Sometimes I find myself trying to forgive myself, and accept that forgiveness, and I feel confused. I think it’s because it’s one of those moments when I should be offended, rather than grateful. In those situations where it’s just not my problem, when I am already accepting where I’m at, I don’t need to forgive myself. Then, the need to forgive myself is probably a symptom that I’m taking on (or for some reason I’m trying to take on) other people’s problems instead of just accepting myself as I am right then and there.
For me, the moment someone else forgives me for doing something that, until that instant, I thought was okay involves a sudden blooming of feelings of guilt. I realize that if I was someone else, if I’d only known what that other person knew, I’d have never made the mistakes I did. The idea that I’ve been forgiven for them already doesn’t mean I don’t go through that process of feeling guilty and disappointed, which is perhaps the opposite of the feeling of acceptance Janet is talking about when she talks about forgiveness. Sometimes I get offended, too, and want to defend myself and attack the person who is implicitly criticizing me (by feeling the need to forgive me).
“I’m running!” or “I’m doing yoga” or “I’m doing the goddamn dishes!” I shout internally. I mean that I’m doing my best and my best is okay so back off! And when it is me forgiving myself, it’s me that I’m shouting at, so that’s a complicated energy exchange.
But if I step back, take a breath, and accept another part of the picture: of course there’s a way in which the spirits of forgiveness and loving kindness blur into and become each other. And being loving and kind to oneself are good things. Full stop. No doubt.
But how? And where does that leave me?
I think the practice of intentional living is rigorous. It is, as Foucault talked about, the internalisation of a set of rules, which is the most absolute way to apply a set of rules. Once rules are internalised, the level of surveillance is constant and all seeing. According to Foucault, this is the brilliance of religion (where religion codifies societal values) as a means of social regulation, especially when compared with the weakness of law enforcement by a group like the police (or teachers, or parents, or local busy-bodies). The police can’t be everywhere or see everything, so if the presence of the police set the standards for behaviour, then there will be large chunks of time where my behaviour doesn’t have to conform to the rules of law. And if my beliefs contradict the police’s, I will actively seek out times and ways to subvert police-surveillance. If, however, I believe an act to be a sin, and all my sins to be accountable to my particular god or my own conscience, then there isn’t a second in my waking day where I am not aware of how far above or below the line I sit. I (as a good, conscientious moral citizen) am constantly policing myself, so the police are free to do other things.
It is possible, however, to think about internal rigor and still be thinking about external behaviours. In yoga, if I let my arm fall down below the horizontal when I didn’t want to I might tell myself I didn’t try hard enough or criticize myself for losing focus. This is a confusion of internal and external. It’s as if the internal is a police force governing the external, and that’s not (or shouldn’t be) the case. It’s an ungenerous, critical, negative and restrictive relationship between inner and outer. This is the mirror of the moments when I run, and I find myself correcting my form as if form is a behaviour and not a manifestation of intent.
Intent is the centre, the heart of everything. It applies to every kind of action, and both lifting my foot and forgiving myself are, equally, actions.
I once worked with a teacher, Kerry, who passed an idea on to me. She told me it was the best thing she’d had passed on to her as a young teacher and shared with the story of how she came to hear this particular piece of advice. She, a newly graduated art teacher, was teaching an art class. She gave a set of instructions to the class and away they went.
By the end of the class there was ink and paint splattered on the walls, on the benches, in the carpet and all over the students, so she reacted like any flustered new teacher would. Her reaction I expect included the shame and frustration every new teacher has experienced of knowing that she hadn’t said or done things she could have done. All that mess and damage highlighted in bright primary colours the things she had failed to explain. They highlighted – to the emotional, reactive centre of her brain – that she was a bad teacher. At least, this is how I felt as a nervous beginning teacher when faced with a situation I didn’t control effectively.
There is a defence mechanism that stands up for the new teachers newly stamped ability to teach and says: it was obvious they weren’t supposed to damage the walls, the benches or the carpet! The instinct to blame the students also matches the feeling that disciplining students is what teachers do: that if students do stupid destructive things then it is the teacher’s responsibility, even obligation, to tell them off.
Getting ink and paint all over the room is self-evidently stupid behaviour, so Kerry did what she was mandated to do, and told them off. Who would have behaved differently?
Well, I think she told them off. I’m not sure, actually. What I do know is that at some point her mentor asked her to look again at what had happened and ask herself if the students had intended to do anything wrong. Was their intention to damage the room? Was it their intention to get her angry? Was it their aim, at any point, to deliberately do the wrong thing? In that case, the answer was no. The students had tried to do what she’d asked, and that had involved making a mess.
The point was, and is, that if someone acts with the right intention, but the outcome is bad, the right response is not aggression or discipline. Rather, they require support and encouragement. Bizarre, but people need to be encouraged to continue to act with the right intention. Of course, teach them how to achieve better outcomes – to not paint the ceiling along with the artwork.
If someone who acts with good intentions is criticised, it creates a lot of confusion about fundamental issues of right and wrong. “I thought I was doing the right thing; now she’s telling me I was wrong.” “She told me to do it – that doing it was the right thing to do – and now she’s telling me I’m wrong.” The only satisfactory explanations are that either she’s inconsistent and untrustworthy or he can’t work out the difference between right and wrong. Not good, either way.
So intention, not behaviour, is the focus. If we act with good intention, the movement will always be right. It may not be pretty, or look exactly the way it should or be the same as everyone, or anyone, else’s. And we must continually forgive ourselves for the way our actions fail to exactly match our intentions.
Michael Cunningham, the author of The Hours, wrote a lovely article in The Age a while ago, in which he talked about the process of writing a book. He said, roughly, that it is always and inevitably a failure. He starts out with the idea of the novel he could write. This novel is vivid and bold and encompassing and generous and is, in every sense of the word, the best novel he could possibly write. The reality is that the novel he writes never lives up to this other, imagined novel, and the process of writing is one of seeing just how far short of this other novel he is going to fall. I have an image of a writer as a long-jumper, leaping as high and as far as he can, only to bash through the smooth sand just short of the line he was aiming for.
But like most of us most of the time, his intention is good. Great even. And in managing to move, or act or behave or write, he has to both congratulate himself and fan the small flame of continuing to try to do the right thing, and forgive himself fully and properly for the outcomes. It is this sense that there is loving kindness in forgiveness, not criticism. And while the rigour with which we can apply to our assessment (and surveillance, to use Foucault’s word) of our intentions is relatively deep and tireless, we are aware that acting with good intentions is not always easy, so it seems pretty natural to approach it with a gentle, flame-fanning attention, rather than the brute force of the parent, teacher, busy-body or policeman.
Finally, I wonder if what also makes Janet a great teacher is that clarity of intention makes it easier to express it and to stay on track with it right through to the completion of the behaviour, the movement, the action. And clarity of intention means using verbs. Feldenkrais talked about how often people suffer from mixed intentions and how that manifests itself in confused and confusing relationships, actions where contradictory desires are expressed and the annoying feelings of being both pushed and pulled, loved and rejected, or attractive and undesirable. The classic symptom is passive aggressiveness. When a movement is described according to its intention, then it has just one intention. One verb, one aim. Unfurl. Reach. Lift. Don’t try to look like you’re as good as someone else or lift like that other person who’s done yoga for ten years. Just feel the energy of “lift” and let that happen inside you. If you do that, your yoga, your running, your dish-washing, your conversational, your “being” practice will be fine.
For a long time, I was a very good basketball shooter. I can say “after years of practice” (and the fact that I practiced for years is important) but the truth is it didn’t feel like years of practice. It felt like I had always had a natural, flowing, relaxed and (it turned out) technically perfect shooting style. It got to a stage where it felt as if I had to do something wrong to miss. I would feel it happen. My elbow would twist, pushing the heel of my hand to the side, or my fingers would claw at the ball at the point of release instead of letting it roll off my fingertips. Then I started coaching, and I read books and manuals and spent a long time trying to teach people how to shoot.
First, I realised, after a long time, that I didn’t help as many people as I’d hoped shoot anywhere near as well as I’d hoped. There were formulas: FEET: Feet, Elbows, Eyes, (follow) Through. It looked sort of right, but sort of mechanical.
The second thing that happened was that my own shooting died. “Died” might sound like a strong word, but it was exactly the feeling. Something that had once been alive – flowing and energetic – became dead. It was as if a series of lifeless metal pullies and levers was trying to imitate a living jumpshot. I think what happened matches what golfers call “the yips”. It’s a kind of paralysis of too-much knowledge and too much thinking.
It took a long time and a few happy accidents (such as watching different babies learn to walk; doing a course in Feldenkrais; and learning to snowboard) for me to come back to shooting, and to realise where I’d gone wrong.
My thinking now is that we don’t learn how to do things by saying: do this… then this… then this. (This is despite the fact that almost every coaching manual and instruction book on any physical activity will describe how to do things in this way.) We learn by understanding the intention of the movement and then trying to get everything else we might do that’s wrong out of the way. The intention of a basketball shot is to get it up and over the ring so that it can drop down through it. The intention of my body, then, is simply to release the ball in the right direction with exactly the right amount of force in a way which is so easy that I can repeat it a lot of times with very few errors.
Be economical. Get everything you can out of the way.
When I returned to shooting in this way – when I concentrated on the feeling of shooting and not the action – and when the outcome became simply an extension of my intention, I found I could shoot again. It was about learning from the inside out, and accessing the feeling of movements again – their energy or intention – and the simpler the intention the better the outcome.
I started shooting more often again, just to unwind, and once I became more aware of the feeling of the right movement, I again got back some of that sensitivity to mistakes. I got back to a point where I could feel when I did something wrong, and knew instantly when and why I had missed. I regained the sensitivity to the difference between my behaviour and my intention. It was a lovely feeling.
I still missed a lot more than I used to, but then again I didn’t return to practicing for hours and hours each week, either. Having the sensitivity didn’t automatically mean I had the skill. That takes practice.
So in a broader sense, when our intentions are clear and not in conflict with each other, it’s easier to act on them. This clarity exists in language as well, and in particular in our use of simple verbs to describe what we’re aiming to do. As I mentioned earlier, Stephen King wrote about how important verbs are to good writing. For me, doing anything well – a movement, an action, a relationship – involves getting better at defining what my intentions are. With daily practice, I get better at knowing, in each moment, exactly what I’m doing and when I’m doing something wrong. At that moment, it’s not about bringing in the police but rather about celebrating the large thing I’m getting right (our intention) and working on the little thing which, at that point (and relatively often!), I’ve got a little wrong.
Running like an elephant celebrates this harmony of simple intention with being in the moment and nowhere else. The intention to run is not the intention to run from here to there – it is simply to run. Getting from here to there is just the outcome. To run I simply have to lift my feet and put them back down again. Lift. Put down. And repeat. Lift. Put down. And repeat.
To look back again at what Thoreau was saying, I ask you to ask yourself every time you go for a run:
“What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”
What business have I being on a run, if I am thinking of something outside the run?
What business have I taking a step on that run, if I am thinking of something outside that step?
What business have I lifting my foot in that step, if I am thinking of something outside lifting that foot?
Focus on your intention, and be in the moment. Just that moment.
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