A Change of Space

Friends from my old dojo may hate me for this, but... this past week, I had my first aikido practice on the beach!  I say this not to show off (well, ok, maybe a little...), but because it gave me some important insight into the degree to which space influences my mental landscape, and can allow for new metaphor and understanding.

To speak to the latter first, one of the most powerful moments in the class was when during technique, our instructor used a wave as a metaphor.  I'd certainly heard things like that in the past, but it was suddenly so much more powerful in that setting, with the waves crashing against the shore and even occasionally appearing over the fairly high ridge between the lawn and the beach.

Linguistically, this shift in my thought makes a lot of sense: peoples create metaphor, and even language, based on their surroundings.  As an extreme example of this, linguists have noted that most pre-industrial societies did not have a word for or conception of blue; instead, it was lumped in with green, or categorized in different ways entirely.  (Cf, http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2 and other such reports.)  I bring this up as an issue, not because blue is hard to see in every-day life, but to show that a natural concept can seem self-evident, but may not be tangible for a long time.  Notably, the Egyptians were one of the only early societies to label blue, and they were the only ones to produce blue dye.  Similarly, it is easy to go through the world knowing what waves are, even having seen waves, but unable to really integrate the concept psychologically until in finding a space where they are front-and-center.

This realization is particularly great in aikido, where we seek very subtle physical feelings that may be hard to verbalize.  However, I think it is also useful to keep in mind for the every-day.  I personally need a change of space fairly frequently to stay fresh in my academic work.  Sometimes, this is very literal: working from home instead of the office, working at a coffeeshop instead of at home, working outside, etc.  Not everyone has that flexibility however.  The other side, I think, is mental space.  For me, this means talking to diverse people with different perspectives.  For example, I got some of my most vibrant ideas recently from a conversation with a physicist about his ideas of mapping love mathematically.  This is a bit extreme, but more mundanely, almost everyone I know complains about how all of their work friends only talk about work.  My circle of friends can't be the only ones who think this when they get home!  Perhaps by bringing other ideas - news stories, good books, cool scientific discoveries - into conversation, we can all get new perspectives, and find a new vocabulary for dealing with everyday tasks.

It is important to stay fresh, and to seek out different ways of looking at the world.  This exposure to difference (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, whatever...) can only enlarge perspective and understanding.  Not every expansion will be useful to every person, but you can only find what does help through the exposure to as much as possible.

But of course, when you're being exposed to the California sun, remember your sunscreen!  ;-)