The Meaning in Movement
As you glance at this title with your newly sharpened skills of critical analysis, you might be tempted to be skeptical and to question its basic premise. I can hear you now, saying something along the lines of, "how can the world of ideas affect our physical existence?" Such incredulity is common. After all, we have been brought up to believe that the mind and body are separate entities that operate in different spheres of learning. If you did raise such a reservation, I would retort, "healer, heal yourself." In other words, examine and change the dualistic premise of your own question. Unless you buy into the Cartesian notion that we are bifurcated beings you probably consider experience to be meaningful as a learning experience.
Exercise 6: To check your beliefs on this subject, let's see how you do on this little test:
- do you find meaning in your own, direct, sensory perception of yourself?
- do you experience yourself as significant during any movement activity?
- do you express your creativity in unique ways through the medium of movement?
- does movement help you to develop a personalized relationship with an impersonal world?
- do you learn about yourself and your environment through your movement experiences?
Discussion: If you answered yes on any of these questions, it would appear that your movement is more significant than the mere physical motion of your body. It is quite possible, however, that the quality of this significance is difficult, perhaps impossible, to explain. The quality of movement is ineffable. How do you describe the aroma of coffee, the feeling of silk, the taste of a fine wine, the sight of a sunset or the sensation of kicking, spiking, throwing or hitting a ball just right? Words cannot capture the magnificence of the moment. Similarly, because we have been taught to embrace the scientific method as a means of determining truth, we tend to accept the evidence of research and dismiss the unmeasurable. However, tests cannot evaluate meaning in movement. What you get out of your activity is personal. It is yours to know and nobody else's to understand. We can measure fitness gains and fatness losses, but the deeper subjective meanings of your movement defy science. Unless you are willing to embrace the ideological extremism of scientism, represented by the phrase, "if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist," you will probably agree that there seems to be more than a trivial relationship between ideas and actions. If you are more than an automaton during your movement experiences, you are straddling the mind/body chasm. It is the quality of this relationship that forms the very essence of many popular activities, particularly in the East, as we will see in a later chapter. Philosophic skills in action
Philosophy is an avenue down which we can travel to discover the meaning in movement. It imparts a sense of direction to our search and a sense of purpose to the selection and conduct of our activity. The skills of philosophic thinking are eminently adaptable to the movement realm.
Exercise 7: If you want to maximize your satisfaction as you select and then participate in physical activity, activate the critical thinking skills of reacting, self-distancing, identifying, analyzing and synthesizing.
 

Philosophic Skills	Selection of Activity	Conduct of Activity
Reacting
Self-Distancing
Identifying
Analyzing
Synthesizing

        Use this table as you conduct a personalized experiment into your own movement choices. Given that there are only so many hours in the day and that you have a busy lifestyle, how do you decide which recreational activities you will elect to do at any given time? I'm sure that the logistics of your situation are a determining factor. For instance, you can only participate in activities that you can afford, that are available in your area and that you are physically suited for, but even within those limitations there is certainly some room for choice. Read the following criteria and then use them to analyze two different activities: one in which you participated recently prior to encountering these philosophic skills and one that you participate in as soon as possible after reading this discussion in which you carefully and deliberately allow these skills to govern your selection and conduct of activity. Record the specifics of your case on the table and examine the qualitative differences between the movement experiences.
Discussion: For philosophy to take place at all, there has to be some form of reaction. Asleep, or in a comatose state, you do not react to what is going on around you. As you become more alert, your interest is triggered by a statement, your observations or an issue that occurs to you and you decide to think more deeply about it before taking action. So, reacting is rather like awakening to a situation. Now what might you be reacting to when you choose a physical activity? The mirror perhaps, or the bathroom scales! Perhaps you are awakening to the sad fact that you don't look or feel the way you want to. Perhaps you realize that you are not moving proficiently or efficiently. Is your reaction more health-based - a history of heart disease in the family, stress at work or a wish to avoid the ailments associated with aging, such as arthritis? Alternatively, you may be reacting to a ho-hum existence, searching for a little more joy or excitement through a physical experience. Your reaction may be fitness, health or happiness-related, all of the above or none of the above. In retrospect, consider which factors governed your initial reaction to your earlier experience and through thoughtful premeditation, determine what you are reacting to as you pick your next activity. The nature of this awakening will have profound ramifications for the subsequent choice of activity. Just as the punishment should fit the crime, so the action should fit the reaction.
    Self-distancing entails taking a step back from the immediate situation to give yourself time and space to reflect in a relatively dispassionate manner. It may be that, although you can appreciate the value of detachment for philosophy, you are not accustomed to treating your recreational moments in like fashion. Many "weekend warriors" leap into activities feet first with little or no forethought. Such rash actions can have serious, debilitating consequences. If only they would spend one iota of the time and attention they devote to considering the "serious" matters of life, such as the advisability of investing in a particular mutual fund, to their recreational choices, they would realize how inappropriate some of their selections really are. Look before you leap is a motto that appropriately describes the demeanor that you should adopt in order to distance yourself during the process of activity selection. As you reach this reflective, detached state, consider and record what your initial inclinations were and in what ways they seem inappropriate upon further consideration.
    The process of identification involves looking inwards at yourself and outwards at your options. It entails introspection to identify your aptitudes and attitudes. A good starting point is your fitness profile. What are you capable of doing? Examine the uniqueness of your own body and its physiology. Most self-inflicted recreational injuries could have been prevented if only the victims had taken the time to identify their own strengths and weaknesses before embarking upon their course of action. A complete personal aptitude inventory extends beyond fitness capacity to include skill level. It is not very rewarding to be completely over your head or to be bored by the lack of challenge in an activity. To avoid such an eventuality, take a few minutes to accurately assess your own skill level. In some activities that is an easier task than others. In tennis, for example, the United States Tennis Association has established a ranking system to enable such self-assessment. Such guidelines are well-intentioned but vague, as tennis players will attest, because they depend upon self-reporting. The variability between 4.5 rated tennis players, for example, is at least partly attributable to the willingness and proficiency of these self-raters to perform the philosophic skill of detached identification. Having established the parameters of your body's capacities, a second important phase in the process of fitness identification is to determine what type of activity your body most needs. To establish an accurate aptitude profile, a blend of philosophical and physiological information and expertise is necessary whereas to identify attitudes a background in psychology is highly desirable. With the help of tests which have been designed to measure your mood states and your personality traits, look inward to determine which needs you wish to satisfy through your activities and choose accordingly. To identify the ideal choice, you must marry your aptitudes and your attitudes with the most appropriate activity available. Once again, the key to your selection is identification. Survey organized recreation in your environment, but don't forget that many of the most satisfying movement experiences can be of your own making. Record on your table a list of the characteristics that you observe in yourself after assessing your aptitudes and attitudes. Also make a short list of the activities that you identify as available to you. Look at this list and consider the extent to which your recent movement experiences have been a good match with your own personal profile.
Through the process of identification, which is essentially information-gathering, the stage is set for the critical final stages of your movement choice. Analyzing demands that you ask yourself some very tough questions, for example,
- given what you know about your physiological profile, what balance do you want to strike between different fitness types and different systems of the body? Perhaps you have tended to emphasize one fitness type, for example strength, over others, such as agility, flexibility, power and endurance, in the past. Similarly, you may have tended to gravitate toward programs of exercise that would benefit your circulo-respiratory or your muscular system without really making conscious choices. Has your decision-making been reflexive or reflective to this point? If reflective, you have probably given your body, it's makeup and it's needs, serious consideration before selecting an activity. Reflexive decision-making resembles the immature knee-jerk reaction stage of philosophic decision-making: reacting emotionally to a stimulus, flying to conclusions and taking the first easy course of action that presents itself. Here you are presented with the opportunity to move up the scale from reflexivity toward reflectivity along both philosophical and physiological parameters.
- how do you want to prioritize your psychological needs? Perhaps you identified affiliation, recognition, leadership, self-discovery and a sense of worth as the outcomes you particularly seek through movement experiences. If so, the next step is to identify and embark upon a course of action that will meet these needs. The problem that you might find yourself dealing with is that few activities meet all of these needs. The few that might, will cater to them disproportionately, for example high in recognition and leadership outcomes but low in affiliation potential. Distinguishing how these needs might be met through your choices and deciding which needs to meet first are basic analytical tasks in the choosing process, the results of which you should record on the table provided.
The culmination of this exercise of using philosophic skills to determine your choice of action is the synthesizing process. This entails constructing your own best solution by taking a wide angle lens perspective. You have awakened to the fact that it is in your best interests to choose an activity, you have taken a step back to consider the situation from a distance, you have identified important features in your profile and in the opportunities that present themselves and you have carefully analyzed what is most important to you. Now it only remains to put the icing on the cake. Look as broadly as you can at the array of options that present themselves to you to find the ones that most closely meet your needs. Perhaps you have identified high risk and high endurance as your top priority - how about an outdoor adventure experience, like rock-climbing and rapelling? Alternatively, your preference may be for activities of a more sedentary cerebral nature, in which case check into the tai chi class at the local Y, or the yoga program being offered at the Recreation Center. If the perfect solution to your search doesn't materialize, use your initiative to fabricate your own movement experience. To complete this exercise, record, on the table provided, the recreational activity that you discover that most closely meets the criteria you have established and the details of one activity that you would invent to fill those unique specifications.
This personalized experiment was designed to demonstrate how the philosophic process can be adapted to improve your decision-making when selecting activities that will not only fill your time, but also fulfil your needs.
Exercise 8: We will now focus on the next phase of what you may have formerly considered to be a physical process: the participatory stage. Underlying both of these narratives is the thesis that the philosophical and the physical elements of being are inextricably interwoven. Even in the heat of the athletic contest, clear and orderly thinking will enhance your effectiveness. Next time you play a sport make a conscious effort to concentrate on the philosophic phases we have discussed. After the event is over, take the time to analyze the effect of this experiment on your game.
    As you enter the contest, react in a more deliberate fashion than you normally would to the setting, to your opponent's demeanor, to your own feelings and to what you observe your opponent trying to do. For example, if you are playing tennis, identify the position of the sun, the strength and direction of the wind, the nature of the court surface and the dimensions of the playing area beyond the court markings. Reacting to the setting will help you to decide how and where you will serve, whether and when to use a lob, if a serve/volley strategy might be effective and whether you have the space to slug it out from behind the baseline. Next, take a good hard look at your opponent's demeanor [without antagonizing by staring!] What do the facial mannerisms suggest - concern, determination, agitation, distraction? What about posture? Is this the slumped figure of one who is resigned to defeat before you? React to these cues as you determine your own game strategy. Make mental notes about your own condition - do you feel confident, energetic and poised for victory? Playing within these feelings is the conceptual basis of successful training methods, such as the fartlek approach, and successful strategies in competition. For example, if you hear a marathon winner explaining that she just ran within herself, she really means that she responded to the fluctuations in her own condition throughout the race, never pushing herself too hard to the point of physiological meltdown, but always staying as close as she could to that upper limit. Finally, react to what your opponent is trying to do, even before the game begins. For example, many a close game of tennis is won or lost during the warmup. Look carefully at your opponent's game to see how he moves, whether he favors the forehand drive over the backhand, which spin he is using on his drives and which of your spins he is comfortable handling, whether he seems awkward at the net, how he transitions from the baseline to the net and whether he seems to have directional control of his serves and a preference for serving to a particular area of your service box.
    Self-distancing is often critical to success on the playing field. After identifying what your opponent can and cannot do, a philosophically mature player will step back from the situation to think about how these observed characteristics can be used to construct a winning strategy. From the beginning of the game, an element of detachment is desirable in order to pursue your goal. Disruption through intimidation, violence and trash-talking is a frequently used strategy in contact sports, such as football, basketball, hockey, rugby and soccer which is designed to break down this attempt at self-distancing, to destroy preconceived strategies and to get the other team to be reactive rather than proactive. Although a passion to play and to win is a prerequisite to sporting success in many instances, it is obviously desirable to maintain a dispassionate demeanor by maintaining an element of detachment in the face of such attempts. The players who are effective self-distancers are more likely to be good coaches than athletes who get so wrapped up in what they are doing that by the conclusion of the contest, they may have won but they have no idea why. To coach well, you have to have the vision that comes from stepping back, observing the bigger picture and identifying the finer points of the situation. The most essential element of successful playing and coaching is also the ultimate goal of the philosophical thinking process: analyzing [your opponent's weaknesses and your strengths] and synthesizing [a winning strategy based on this analysis]. At the highest levels of professional and Olympic sports, a veritable army of skilled analysts works to enhance performance and to plot ways to exploit perceived weaknesses in an opponent's arsenal of skills. You may not be a member of that elite cadre but your game may still benefit from the processes of reacting, identifying, self-distancing, analyzing and synthesizing. Try it and if you record any significant differences you will have experienced the benefit of philosophy in action.