We stop running just for the fun of it. We stop letting out the shouts and belly laughs. We stop looking at the treetops and start walking the city sidewalks staring at the pavement. We begin, somewhere along the line, to "keep a stiff upper lip," to put "starch" in our spines, to speak softly and when spoken to. Our behavior becomes "acceptable" and, in the process, we are cut off bit by bit from ourselves and therefore from each other. If my impulses can't get through to me, how can i possibly share them with you? As we lose touch with our bodies our heads take over and begin to monitor our actions, to restrict our responses until the simple interaction of children becomes an elaborate and inaccurate communication system between brain A and brain B
Jules Feiffer pictures one of these disconnected, clever heads Floating around complaining about its headless, funny looking, malfunctioning body. “it’s lucky,” Feiffer’s head says, “that I need my body to carry my head around …
Otherwise…. Out it would go.”
Too drastic.
We can fit our head back onto our bodies. We can rediscover the links between the head bone and the toe bones. We can regain the freedom to spread our arms out wide; to run and shout without feeling awkward or embarrassed. We can learn to fall down, jump up, and bend over without breaking. We can unlock the sounds of our sadness and our joy. We can tune in to the beat of our pulse and stamp our feet to our inborn sense of rhythm. We can explore the sounds and the gestures of our feelings and our dreams. We can reclaim our bodies and our voices; free them to rediscover our inherent sense of balance and design; and use them to show each other who we are and what we hope to be.