Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [74]
For a new physical education, we must cast a wider net than do the current myths of “exercise.” It is great when the inactive become more active, and more time devoted to even basic physical activity in schools would be welcome: mens sana in corpore sano, as Juvenal said. Exercise, however, is but one thin slice of what a new physical education could provide.
In the first, pre-verbal year, a tremendous amount is conveyed to children in how they are physically handled. You cannot talk a baby in and out of diapers, clothes, or car seats. The non-verbal dialogue of guided movement in the first year underlies the dialogue you have with him or her as a teenager. Courses in baby handling offered to all parents could transform parenthood into a richer syntax between child and parent (especially fathers, who in our culture often know next to nothing about handling and communicating with tiny bodies).
Understanding the natural spiral movements that lead into easy, upright alignment would eliminate many of the aches, pains, and degenerative diseases that plague and cost our society. Understanding the somatic aspect of feelings transforms the perils of adolescence. Stress, however much you may touch it with talk therapy, is a fundamentally physical, bodily response. The ability to detect stress within the body facilitates less conflict in social situations, as well as reducing chronic disease. Maintaining movement into senescence can extend productive lives. Most kids graduate from high school knowing more about the principal exports of Chile than they know about their own feelings and their bodily language.
A well-constructed program could build intuition, which is grounded in our bodily “hunches” and kinesthetic perceptions. In fact, there is a vast, largely unstudied area we could call “KQ,” kinesthetic intelligence or physical intelligence. We are familiar with IQ (Intelligence Quotient) and becoming familiar with EQ (emotional intelligence), but KQ is largely uncharted. In my own case, I have two left feet for dance but have significant KQ in my hands—a fact I discovered when I was eight but did not recover and utilize until my late twenties, when I encountered meditation and the martial arts, and took up manipulation of bodies as a career. Other people have startlingly good contact with their intuition but no ability to relate socially. The kids doing lay-ups in vest-pocket parks in New York display highly developed KQ, which is largely unused except by those who end up with NBA contracts.
Living now requires us to return to the lived experience of the body. I believe that doing so would produce a human who is more aware and more compassionate (as in the story with which we started). The physically educated human can be more calmly energetic, more sustainable, more aware of what is eaten and what is pooped. The basis of ecology is in the body; the basis of peace is in the biological cooperation.
Would a kinesthetically evolved populace tolerate injustice? Send its children off to war? Madly and blindly consume? Tolerate so much waste?
Our commercial culture pays billions (in advertising) to keep us away from our true sense of ourselves. To be constant consumers, we must constantly feel a lack: you don’t smell right; your hair is less than perfect; you need this medicine; if only you had this car, you would get a makeover and a smile.… It is a distasteful and unsustainable way to build an economy, and it is very bad for our bodies and biosphere.
However we get to a sustainable system, it is the only choice available in the long term. Continue on our merry way, and we will be eliminated, another experiment tried and failed by the sun playing upon the earth’s rich surface. We are not essential to the process; we are just the current best hope. The whales and elephants may be intelligent, but they do not hold the future of the planet in their flippers or trunks. We do—sad, but true. Grounding ourselves back into our bodies will