Moving Well

Our minds, insight, knowledge, biases, and ignorance are not disconnected from physicality and embodiment. 

I have to work at moving out of my head and taking my body more seriously. 

 I enjoy watching GMB.io and other teachers of movement culture using small gentle movements and body weight exercises to work on flowing control. A dance of gravity and strength. 

I definitely feel that I have to make time for exercise, and don't. Particularly when I am desk-bound. I wrestle with deep soaked guilt. Maybe less guilt... and more prioritisation. Even though I *know* I need to move, the bottomless pit of things-to-do always seems to scream loudly. 

 

Movement culture proponents try incorporate movement into life, rather than explicity making time for it. 

How are you working? How are you sitting? While you are making a cup of tea, can you do some stretches as the kettle boils? Building movement into your lifestyle. Like kids, when they have to go somewhere... they run! 

Strength builds endurance. Like weight training where some stress in a controlled environment builds your capacity for when chaos descends. For when you are pushed outside your energy and power comfort zone. 

Flexibility builds resilience. Ideally. you are not just focused on one set of exercises, but you can adapt and adjust to whatever is happening. 

 

Control is the intention behind creativity. Where you move smoothly and consciously, despite - ambiguity, - randomness, and - complexity. 

When you watch masters of calisthenics, their bodies seem to operate according to different laws of physics. Yet their movement looks way more natural than the awkwardness of niggles and knots, when we normally don’t use our bodies then expect them to jump to action. 

Autonomy and Consent

Once you have a deep understanding of yourself and where you are, you can build capacity. To handle the random, ambiguous, and complicated change you are a part of. You will be able to cope. “I am okay now. I will be okay later. I will thrive.” 

Plans are neither static, nor able to remove difficulties. Plans are a tool to create a process to deal with problems as they arise and evolve. Challenge means you are alive. In movement culture (calisthenics) they focus on developing strength, flexibility, and control (see GMB.io). This is the same idea I talk about with financial yoga and stilling the waves of money anxiety. 

Strength is endurance. The building of your muscles through regular controlled stress. Through workouts, varied between Sustained Medium-Intensity and High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). 

Flexibility is resilience. Your ability to adapt and adjust to accommodate different situations. Through calm and relaxed lengthening of your muscles. 

Control is creativity. It is the ability to see, evaluate, decide, act, and get the intended consequences you were looking for despite all the things that are not in your control. 

Moving well gives you an underlying sense of autonomy and consent.

Moving Well

To the Backline

My growth spurt was delayed. After being a fearless forward in my introduction to rugby, I was introduced to high school. I had not grown, and my mother was not happy on the sidelines (not) seeing a tiny boy being swallowed up in the middle of a scrum with a habit of collapsing. I was not fast at all, nor particularly skillful with the ball, and didn’t have any strategic insight and overview of field positioning. The choice to move to the backline also seemed to sap my courage when monsters had run-ups. A friend of mine, Shaun, used to delight in running towards me and screaming because I would just throw the ball away. Fearlessness kicked in at various stages when my voice deepened, and centimeters stretched. I once again became more willing to throw myself into situations where I could potentially get hurt.  

 

Entry Ticket

You can think of risk as stress, and stress is not all bad. “Discomfort is the entry ticket to a meaningful life”. In exercise, you have High Impact Interval Training. Putting the body under stress in a controlled fashion can be a good thing. That is the way we learn. The body follows a use-it-or-lose-it strategy, and is ruthlessly efficient at redistributing its energy. If you start doing press-ups, your muscles will get bigger as your body responds. If you stop doing those press-ups, your muscles will get smaller. If you go for runs regularly, you will get faster and it will become more comfortable. If you stop running for a while, you start getting tired when you go for random, irregular runs. The body directs resources to where they are needed, and takes them away when they are not used. If you want to build up strength, you put your body under stress in a controlled fashion to build up your capacity for when you are in uncontrolled situations. Developing the strength and flexibility to maintain control when you are not in a planned environment. 

1930s Turnstile

 

Half Squash

Every decision has trade-offs and constraints. It is nice to believe we can identify and avoid all the things we don’t like and hide them under an upturned Gem Squash. It is nice to believe we could all run the 100 metres in under 10 seconds if we really put our mind to it. We can’t. As Cicero said in the Gladiator, “Sometimes I do what I want to do. The rest of the time, I do what I have to.” Brutal honesty combined with some optimism and belief in small, achievable goals can gradually disempower constraints. Given time and application. Facing harsh realities can be done with kindness. We can build buffers to soften blows. To give us recovery time. To allow us to build flexibility and strength. We can chip away at reality, and change it. But every journey starts where you are. 

You can't hide the bits you don't like under the Gem Squash

 

Finding a Path

When you are looking for the commitment required for long-term endurance, the path is through complex relationship building. Understanding money is relatively easy by comparison. There are significantly more interesting ways of releasing flavour, that we do not seek out because it requires work. Work that is profoundly rewarding, but asks a lot of us. Asks us to be better. In a way that is not relative to other people. That neither excludes others, nor creates bubbles of comforting success. A deeper sense of better. Through grappling, struggling, and engaging. It is beautifully difficult. You must want that beauty.

I suspect most of us default to the path of least resistance. Responding to confidence in a complicated world. We are all so confused, that if someone looks confident, it is enticing to say, “I’ll just do what they told me to do.” Freedom of movement requires strength and flexibility built consciously and actively, rather than the passive following of instruction.

Financial Calm

Financial calm does not require you to be loaded. It comes from a level of confidence that you can cope in three dimensions. 

1) With decisions that take you left or right. 

2) With the unexpected bumps of ups and downs. 

3) With the endurance to keep on keeping on. 

Financial calm can come with belief in your plan. Not a crystal ball that sees the future. Instead planned capacity for futures. When you know you are living within your means, then deep soaking calm builds your strength, flexibility, and control. In a way that radiates through how you move. 

Stress releasing from your muscles and joints. Living within your means allows you to expand the length and smoothness of your inhalation and exhalation. Identifying and building the skills and knowledge needed for a source of income. Overcoming the barriers and securing your container. 

Calm is not the size of the ins and outs. 

Calm is the space between the ins and outs.

Up-Down, Left-Right, Forward-Back

Risk Tolerance

Financial Planning starts with a conversation about you and your relationship with money. The goal being to understand your risk tolerance. If you want to still the waves of money anxiety, you are building your capacity to deal with complexity, randomness, and ambiguity. We do not, and cannot, have a complete understanding of cause and effect. We cannot know in advance what the result will be for each path we pick. If we did, we would all just pick the one that took us to our intended destination. The rules are always changing. You cannot just do exactly what has been done in the past, and expect the same result. A good conversation about financial planning starts with understanding you as a person, how you see money, what your goals are, and what you value. You do not get paid for taking risk. You get paid for adding value in monetizable areas others have signaled is in short supply. Risk tolerance is mainly your ability to adapt, adjust, and accommodate. Like physical strength and flexibility, risk tolerance is something you can build through exercise. Then you make money, or your money makes money, by solving problems for decision makers with money.

Discovering Fire

A foundation of our superiority challenges is a core belief in Second Class Citizens. It is hard to separate out some of the complex problems around sexism, xenophobia, racism and classism from things we hold to be true. One of those is that we get taught preferences from a young age. We overhear stories about successful people and unsuccessful people. The voices of people we admire soak into the voices in our head. We question if we are good enough. Then we start seeing the strengths of others through this view. Engineers hire Engineers. Accountants hire Accountants. South Africans hire South Africans. Oxbridge graduates hire Oxbridge graduates. Even when we superficially break from these categories, seeing the strengths that don’t resonate is challenging. Wealth creation is a team sport. But if you have a God Complex thinking you are the source of value, and everyone else is there to support you, then clearly you are not going to see the strengths of mortals. Till they discover their fire and topple you.

Drawing Breath

You don’t learn much about whether a process works, when it is working. The most powerful creative forces are time and consistency. But for the long term to be long term, the process needs to be able to adapt, adjust, and accommodate. Strength, flexibility, and control in the face of randomness, complexity, and ambiguity. Like gaps in music, real mastery lies in the ability to draw breath and gain perspective. To step back and gain a broader view of how everything is connected. To use disruption as a learning opportunity. 5Rhythms is a movement meditation developed by Gabrielle Roth in the 1970s. It takes you through Waves to release obstructions and inspire creativity. You move through flow, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness. The key is movement, and being still is part of that. This too will pass.

5Rhythms

Developing Autonomy

The team at GMB Fitness talk of developing Physical Autonomy through working on strength, flexibility and control. Watching them move so gracefully makes it appear as if the laws of physics apply differently to them. I started Yoga 11 years ago, yet I still have aches and pains which constrain me. I declared Financial Independence 5 years ago, yet I still have costs and pressures which constrain me. The analogies between how we engage with the world physically and financially resonate strongly. Finances aren’t about what you do, they are about how you do it. They are about movement. I love the idea of more people moving through the world with autonomy, agency, and consent. Feeling empowered to make choices. Moving with mastery. It isn’t about having the Financial Freedom to opt-out. It is about releasing the way we engage with the world from the constraints of unnecessary niggles. Then engaging with the pulse, the beat, and the flow of meaning creation.

GMB Fitness - Strength, Flexibility, Control