The Churn

Seen from outside it

Spending some time mostly off the internet—I’m at a Feldenkrais Method advanced training, staying in a welcoming beach-town house with about 10 other people, doing inquisitive, tactful hands-on work with one another, cooking and eating and “talking story”—the churning world our heads are immersed in most of the time, us online types, may be seen from afar.

It looks like a dark, slowly revolving mass of ominous fog, a slow-moving, expanding tropical depression, a forming, force-gathering hurricane, deadly … and deadly boring.

It looks like this:

The presentiment . . . was now a presence. It was there. It was an area, or perhaps a time period, of a sort of emptiness. It was the presence of absence: an unquantifiable entity without qualities, into which all things fell and from which nothing came forth. It was horrible, and it was nothing.

This is not to say that being close up with people is all sweetness and light. Ordinary life is a battlefield, and it’s often to activate our natural aptitude to heal from its wounds and thrive amidst its onslaughts that people come to the Feldenkrais Method. People have harrowing, incredible stories: near-death births, devastating car or bike accidents, brain tumors, impaired children who live with them for life, years of caregiving for a parent or spouse with dementia. … Embodied life is a crapshoot, a dance on the edge. Everybody’s dodged bullets, and failed to dodge a few.

Is this why we’d rather stick our heads in the revolving cloud where at least the angst is abstract?