Why: Movement and the Modern Existential Dilemma
Humanity has never come so close to losing itself - the juggernaut of progress is moving so fast, leaving us choking on the dust of a modern existential crisis. Who are we, who do we want to be?
Movement can be a major piece of that puzzle - nothing else both sits at the origin of what we are and can, yet simultaneously guide us along a path of growth and complexity.
This is what makes movement so appealing as a practice. Beyond its functionality, beyond its contributions to health, movement can serve us in times that feel like standing on the precipice of losing ourselves.
Towards Higher Complexity
Everything we’re doing through this movement practice seems to be for the sake of injecting more complexity into this system.
Whether it’s improving predictive systems and timing mechanisms, refining motor maps, developing coordination of disparate elements to yield a coherent outcome, building an internal/cybernetic architecture, pattern acquisition, etc… it all takes us towards higher complexity.
Fortifying the Human Origin
And yet, even as the complexity of the system increases, something of the origins remains, and indeed, becomes strengthened and fortified.
Perhaps this is because physical movement is fundamentally constrained by every evolutionary step we’ve taken since our protean origins. Inside of the limitation, the seeds of freedom. The freedom to grow and expand while staying close to the source to remain, at heart, human.
Movement: at the intersection of origin and complexity
Just as breath is invaluable for sitting at the intersection of conscious and unconscious processes, and thus became a primary tool in meditation, movement is invaluable for sitting at the intersection of origin and complexity.
These two opposing poles, where we come from and where we go, compete in what seems a zero-sum game - as binarism gives way to cyborgism, as dualities yield multiplicities…
Do we align ourselves with the past or the future?
Stuck inside the dilemma, the hidden path reveals itself
Movement as practice gives us the perspective to notice a third hidden path, to neither abandon our origins nor remain unable to evolve.
This hints at resolutions to our greatest challenges - social, technological, political, spiritual… If we can find the hidden path buried INSIDE the riddle of the zeitgeist, we can push open the door to a new era, the next step in evolution.