This evening I got a dance lesson from a friend who really knows how to dance. It was wonderful and fun and enlightening, but also humbling.
The experience made me realize how much I generally live within my head, and not within my body. I wonder how many experiences I am missing by not having my full body involved in the processes of my mind.
Something my friendly dance instructor said really stuck with me. She told me “I need to teach you not to think.”
Yes, I can see that. There is ancient wisdom in the body. Alas, it is a particular form of wisdom that the mind can all too easily forget.
I am reminded of Zen and the Art of Archery: You can’t think your way to learning how not to think.
When I first learned how to dance with a partner as a lead I was always in my head : “where the feets are supposed to be ? am I on time ? what moves to do next ?”. With times and years it get easier and things that seems unfathomable then are now natural.
The process of making new paths in our brain from chaos and refine them is fascinating !
Yet I still think primarly with my mental, which seems quite a slower brain to process many relevant informations than the emotional or physical one (let’s say the limbic and nervous system).
Maybe to grasp the whole human experience with as many perspective and depth as we can we might try more often to go off the shore of the known and comfortable and open new paths in our brains ?
I wonder why we label ourselves as engineer or artist, thinker or maker, why not embrace them all ? Let’s revive the renaissance principle and merge the Vitruvian with the the Krebs Cycle of Creativity !
https://spectrum.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/neri-oxmans-krebs-cycle-of-creativity-830×754.jpg
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! To be historically complete, the 2×2 grid of artist/scientist/designer/engineer was originated by Rich Gold. It appears in his book The Plenitude: Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff.
Ah yes thanks ! I like to call it the OMG diagram, for Oxman – Maeda – Gold. GMO might be chronologically more precise, but OMG is definitely more fun to say 🙂