An Ode to Our Bodies

Meeting us on the sidewalk en route to bagels on a crunchy (as in, there were crunchy leaves underfoot), allegedly sleepy Saturday morning about a month ago, the jovial landlord (raking said leaves) chuckled and said, “You guys can’t go down that way, not for a good few hours. The road is blocked.” Not inquiring any further on why exactly the road was blocked, we went ahead anyway, with the logic that very little could stand in the way between James and his early morning coffee and me and bread.

There was actually a rather legitimate reason why 4th Avenue was impassable that morning. What we saw, and in fact heard, were 45,000 pairs of feet running along 4th Avenue, a typically busy four-lane road now lined with dedicated layman cheerleaders.  The New York City Marathon, arguably the largest in the world, was passing us by, one rippling tibia following another. A band to our left, in front of a closed Brooklyn fire station, played the encouraging score from Star Trek, then Rocky, then…you get the idea. And is that a family of seven spectating from a fourth floor fire escape? Why, yes, it is. Oh, and look at the cop in the median, facing the runners with a very sincere double thumbs up. Needless to say, the energy was contagious and we decided to break our fast a little later.

 

There is something urgently awesome about applauding people on their way to conquering an utter physical feat, en masse. Coming from someone who currently spends the majority of her weekday hours sitting in front of two monitors on an L-shaped desk under sensored office lighting, the awe is tripled. There is no surer reminder of how much one has disregarded a fully working anatomy than the news that a person who exists in the same dimension just ran 26.2 miles in 2 hours and 5 minutes.

As James cheered personalized encouragements to the runners (made easier by the name tags hanging around their necks, bobbing up and down with each jaunt), and I took pictures of adorable young offsprings waving signs for their parents (or the occasional parents waving signs for their young offsprings), the words of Ken Robinson from his February 2006 TED talk more than mildly rushed over me. More specifically (and more relevantly), I remember his statement,

There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don’t we?…Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side…[University professors] look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads…

I must have watched this talk dozens of times, and it always floored me, floored me in that it’s completely true. The amount of abuse and neglect, in equal parts, I’ve put my body through, all the while glorifying the importance of striving for sound intelligence is really quite sick. Evolutionarily speaking, is it right that I – and the general adult population of the developed world – sit in a swivel chair for 9 to 12 of the 15 hours that we are awake? Are we supposed to accept that 3.5 billion years of physio-biological  mutation, adaptation, convergence, diversification, and specialization from life’s universal single-celled common ancestor has led to this glorious state of…immobility? Is this really the measure of the breadth of our human capacity? Or is it more likely that we should, by all scientific standards, actually spend more of our time running and dancing, utilizing each and every mind-bogglingly interconnected and complex limb and muscle for miles and miles?

This is why I tip my hat to all of you runners, hikers, walkers, dancers, jumpers, spinners, divers, general movers. You, everyday, make our species proud.

Advertisement