Vibrant Bodies

A post about committing to doing scary things

It’s May and the world around me is bursting into bud and bloom. Pavements are pink with fallen cherry blossom and the first of the bluebells are making their appearance in the woods nearby. The change in the air brings with it a sense of possibility and a desire to do new and exciting things. In the last two weeks, I’ve finally forced myself into the North Sea for my first surfs of 2023. On Sunday I was greeted by a seal whose curiosity seemed as reinvigorated by the change in the weather as mine.

The regenerative cycle of winter into spring and early summer is something of a cliché, but I can’t help being recharged by the possibilities that seem to be opening up with longer and warmer days. There are things I want to do and places I want to go. There are new experiences that I want to have. However, the desire for novelty comes with a tingling nervousness - a nervousness that comes when one isn’t quite sure how something new might feel. It’s this curious, vibrant feeling that I want to explore in this week’s post.

Learning is often framed as a process of developing competencies or skills. It’s less common to think of learning as a process of finding new ways to live in and experience the world. I think it’s important to see it as both. When we learn a new skill we are opening up a new set of possibilities. We are establishing new ways of encountering and engaging with the environment.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the work of James Gibson - whose ecological approach to psychology recognised the interrelation between body, self and environment. Gibson came up with the theory of affordances to explain how our perceptual understanding of the environment is inseparable from our sense of how we can move in relation to it. A good swimmer’s understanding of the affordances of water is very different from someone who can’t swim at all. A visual artist might look at the rocky face of a mountain as the subject of a painting. A rock climber might look at it as a playground. The skills we learn shape how we see and guide how we respond to the world.

But what does this have to do with fear or nervousness?

I’m not very good with heights. When I was a child, I hated ladders. I found it almost impossible to walk up open riser staircases. Glass lifts made me feel sick. As I grew up, I found ways to manage and mask my fear; but the fear itself remained. Despite this, about ten years ago, I decided to take up rock climbing - specifically bouldering. My engagement with this practice has been an interesting process of discovery. Although bouldering doesn't require climbers to go very far from the ground, through learning to climb, I began to recognise that as I grew stronger and more competent my ability to deal with heights improved. The more confident I was hanging from one arm, or balancing on one toe 10 feet from the floor, the less I worried about the consequences of falling.

I wouldn’t say that I’ve fully overcome my fears, but last summer I spent a day with my (much more daredevil) wife and daughter at a theme park riding the rollercoasters. As I queued for the first one, I wondered how I was going to cope. When the harness locked me into place and the cars began their ascent up the first incline I felt some butterflies; but, as I reached the top, I took a breath and made an agreement with myself to keep my eyes open on the descent. It was fine. Maybe even fun. My nerves spiked again as we came towards the loop-the-loop, but when the cars inverted I realised that I’d been here before. This feeling was not dissimilar to the feeling of the backflip I’d been learning to do in my tumbling classes. If anything, it was much less scary. The places I’d visited in the past had fundamentally altered where I felt comfortable going in the present.

This experience lent tangible credence to the idea that learning new skills opens new worlds. I think it also goes some way towards explaining why the desire to learn something new can produce feelings of anxiety. Because it demonstrates the slightly nerve-wracking fact that learning new things has the capacity to alter who you are.

Spending time bouldering and learning how to do a (ropey) backflip has turned me into someone who likes rollercoasters. It’s a fact that my 6-year old self would find very difficult to believe, but, as Feldenkrais liked to say, ‘You don’t know what you don’t know.’ And here we get to the core of what I’m interested in this week.

You don’t know what you don’t know sounds like a rather elliptical and silly statement, but I think it explains something profound about the feeling of anxiety that comes with learning new things. When we encounter a challenge that we haven’t faced before - one that we feel we might not be able to overcome - we also encounter a feeling of absence. To not know how to do something is intimately connected to not knowing how it might feel to do it. This kind of not knowing can also create a kind of anxiety, because it illuminates the edge between who we are now and who we need to become to meet the challenge.

While I was waiting to get on board that first rollercoaster, I imagined that there was an edge between what I knew and what I needed to know to feel safe. I grew nervous, recalling my childhood fears. However, I soon found that I had the skills I needed. The edge existed only in my imagination. Learning to hold and control my own weight at height while climbing, and learning to organise myself upside-down and away from the floor during tumbling, had transformed me - giving me the knowledge necessary to meet the rollercoaster without fear.

I suppose I’m arguing that it’s worth making friends with the feelings of nervousness and anxiety, because if we attend to them they can show us the edges that exist between who we are and who we’d like to be. The practice of tumbling is a good case-study here, because it’s full of unknowns. It’s impossible to know how it will feel to jump backwards, headfirst into a backwards handspring until we do it. Before people try it for the first time, there is always a moment where they freeze and find themselves reckoning with the edge between not knowing and knowing. Even if you’ve had someone support you though the movement by holding your back and guiding you, the first jump on your own is always a leap into the unknown. It’s scary and exciting. But it’s worth committing to the leap, because on the other side of that edge is a new you - a more vibrant and capable you, who can see the affordances of world in new ways.

I’m not suggesting here that we should force ourselves to do things that feel scary or painful. To do so would be to advocate a kind of self-imposed disembodiment. Instead, I’m suggesting that we should commit to trying something scary as often as feels sensible. I’m advocating a commitment to noticing the feelings that emerge when we encounter one of these edges, and interrogating how accurately they reflect the challenge ahead.

In parkour this process is referred to as ‘breaking the jump’. It’s the process of finding out what is truly possible at the limits of your capabilities. So this week, I invite you to find a jump (real or metaphorical) and look for ways to break it. For some of you this might mean dusting off the cartwheel or backflip you could do as a teenager. For others it might just be trying a handstand or a headstand away from the wall. It doesn’t matter which. I simply invite you to find an edge and spend some time investigating your fears. Who knows what you’ll find if you can bring yourself to step beyond that edge? After all, you don’t know what you don’t know.