Lateral Moves

…ways to negotiate upcoming wrinkles.

Photo Cliff Scholz

There’s a danger in publishing a piece like my most recent one, Negotiating Upcoming Wrinkles. Thing is, given the pervasive challenges outlined there, there’s an awful tendency for people to shut down, to double down on hopelessness, despair, patterns of blame, and feelings of powerlessness in the face of the trends described. This is emphatically not my intent. So the question then becomes, what is a sensible response to such powerful techno-social forces, or any other dehumanizing influence?

This essay presents one line of inquiry that may help us navigate forward.

The very first thing I was taught in kung fu class was what our teacher called a “high block front hand, sidestep front foot.”  It involves a lateral movement of the hand in one direction, at the level of the incoming punch to face, but more importantly a lateral sidestep in the other direction with the feet. The result is, one moves at about a right angle to the hostile incoming energy, hopefully avoiding the punch altogether by getting out of the way. The next three techniques we learned also involved sidestepping — lateral movements at right angles to incoming punches and kicks.

This “move at right angles principle” applies in other situations. For example, if you’re  swimming in the ocean and get caught in a rip current flowing out to sea, the recommended response is to swim laterally, parallel to shore, i.e. at right angles to the flow of the outgoing current. Trying to swim directly to shore can be like running on an endless treadmill: Those who try this may tire and never get there. They may sink.

So, whether it’s a punch or a rip current, the best responses are perhaps counterintuitive at first. Try to avoid opposing. Move out of the line of action. Move sideways.

Likewise, only occasionally will I indulge in any writing that opposes things. In kung fu our teacher quoted Mr. Miyage in The Karate Kid: “Best block— no be there.” That’s sidestepping. But the even more fundamental rule of kung fu that Sifu emphasized is: “Don’t get hit.” Point is, there are times to avoid a blow to the face by opposing that incoming energy with a raised forearm. Likewise there are times to oppose social forces, trends, and developments, and I will sometimes do so in my writing. That said, most of the things shared in this essay represent lateral movements intended to demonstrate new possibilities and a wider range of effective responses.

This is also true of what I’m trying to do here generally. Whether you’ve been reading this Substack account for a while or are new here and going back to review older publications, what I think you’ll find are occasional elements of opposition to things I find destructive, yes, but a general preference to instead demonstrate useful lateral movements in thought and action. Alternatives. New dimensions available for meaningful shifts of awareness and behavior with the potential for opening lines of development, hopefully leading to a better place, and a fuller experience of life.

So let’s take a little survey of things I’m personally doing that might provide inspiration for how to sidestep some of the dehumanizing trends and flows now current in our civilization:

Enjoy natural and incandescent light

As described elsewhere, not all indoor lighting technologies are created equal. Although I’m sensitive to the energy costs and impacts of incandescent compared with fluorescent and LED lighting, evidence suggests these intermittent lighting technologies tend to be biologically fatiguing. I’ve lately begun to consider that they may even function as kind of collective trance induction. When I started to feel into their effects, fluorescent and LED lights seem to render the environment in a strange and dreamlike way. The suggestion here is to use less light, use better light, get out in the sun when possible (note that a whole generation has been taught to fear it) and if you’re indoors working or reading and have the opportunity to move to a window for illumination, try it. It feels different. Besides, stepping outdoors represents a decisive lateral move all on its own.

Read physical books

Physical books made of paper have by no means been outmoded. In 2005 I heard Joseph Chilton Pearce deliver some talks here in Michigan and he cited studies showing that reflected light influences the brain in a different way than illuminated screens do, with improved memory retention when we get our information from paper and ink media. The idea that paper is wasteful, harmful or outmoded only makes sense if we don’t mind paying the price of a dumber population. Paper books also have the advantages of being durable, sharable, and impossible for authorities to retroactively modify if their content is found to be objectionable at some point in the future. You wanna read? Get the real article. And, btw, you are always welcome to print anything on this account for your own [private, noncommercial] use.

Read pre-electric authors

There’s a trend in thought that says only the new stuff matters, that anything from the past is dated and ignorable. I’m not sure why “the latest thing” is assumed always to be the best. There’s simply much more past than present, so if we only look at what is new or recent, we’re going to miss the vast majority of the good stuff out there. The past is vast. So, although reading in general is preferable to more passive forms of information gathering, one way I’ve found to amp up that value even further is to read authors from the pre-electric age. Their modes of expression, vocabulary and overall energy is just different enough to make them a challenge to read at times (a plus), while at the same time moving readers laterally out of the prevailing current trends of our social conditioning.

Meditation and breathwork

Any practice that moves one toward an inward focus can be used to help negotiate the ongoing current flows. Meditation could be seen as the ultimate sidestep. The currents of life carry us onward. Meditation carries us inward, at right angles to that flow. This in itself helps explain why meditative practices can be such a benefit, especially in a culture like ours where techno-social conditioning toward time often keeps people in an addictive, frenetic mindset of “And then what? And then what? And then what? What’s next?” We tend to go from thing to thing to thing and lose ourselves in the process. Personally, right now I mostly engage in breathwork, which due to its inward focus and alteration of consciousness, has similar effects. Find what works best for you.

Build better relationships with food

Food is intrinsically intimate. Like sex, which is also intrinsically intimate, it is best enjoyed in the context of relationship. And like sex, food can even be destructive to indulge in without a relational and social context. There are many ways of building relationship into one’s “food life”.  Home cooking, sharing meals, and developing relationships with one’s own food plants or animals are all good starts. To really get the most from the lateral movement of a change in food habits, just being aware of our food is a great first step. Another big step for many could be foraging wild foods for part of our diets. Doing so can help bring out our wildness — sidestepping habits of domestication, while getting us outdoors. (Another sidestep!) Through advertising dollars, our well-funded social conditioning is: eat whatever is fast, convenient, predictable. This is plainly not working. Expanding our food palette and incorporating into our lives the space, time and ceremony needed to really build relationship at all levels of our experience of nourishment can be a profound way to step out of the prevailing and often degenerative eating patterns that are common in our culture.

Whatever people are currently in an uproar about, focus elsewhere

There’s an awful tendency among us humans to get caught up in whatever the latest thing is, and it doesn’t take a genius to see how this tendency makes it easier for those seeking to manipulate public discourse, driving people into narrow, pre-determined emotional states and patterns of thinking. The payoff for us, such as it is, is a sense of group identification and belonging: “We’re the good ones!” The way our society has been structured, the purchase price for our often illusory sense of social cohesion is the “othering” of people who hold different views: “If it weren’t for those darn [fill in the blank] this country wouldn’t be going to hell in a handbasket!” A moment’s thought would reveal that blaming others and name-calling are just as useless and destructive now as when we were told not to do these things as children. There’s a whole world waiting to be seen an experienced outside this two-sided, tit-for-tat stalemate and whatever else is being heavily promoted in the media at the moment. There are many sides. There are whole different things. The suggestion here is to shift your focus away from these mesmerizing influences. Leave the manipulative programming aside. Look elsewhere. We can still meet our needs for belonging and human connection. What I find as I look elsewhere is that I often encounter other people who are similarly engaged.

* * *

These are just a few ways to sidestep the juggernaut of the collective conga line. These suggestions aren’t meant to be read as a recipe book, but as things to try and indicators of directions for potentially helpful movement and change. Other examples I’ve seen are things like listening to vinyl sound recordings and other analog media rather than digital. Or smiling in a world where it seems fewer people smile. Or maybe: creating and experimenting in a world that has shaped us to think of ourselves as consumers and people who need to be told what to do. If you’re used to buying music, make music. Take a “news fast” in which you avoid all news reports in the media for a day, a week, or longer. Leave your phone at home on purpose. Feel the freedom of releasing that tether! Generate your own signals. YOU are the transmitter, not your device.

Perhaps the biggest sidestep of all is to operate from love and truth, to maintain the intention of doing so even if things get difficult, and to find ways to stay open when others are moving towards closing down in fear and judgment.

There are plenty of sidesteps available, lots of ways of swimming lateral to the rip current.

The suggestion here is to find them. Navigate knowing that’s what you’re doing. Find others doing likewise. And share your results.