Listen to thisLast month I began to share some of my musing on themes that have emerged over the years from my sketches about my experience in Child and Youth Care. I continue this month with my thoughts on motion and stillness, two themes, which I wrote about briefly earlier in this column. My belief is that we have to continually try to understand themes like these in order to be in Child and Youth Care with youth.
Again, please feel free to muse along with me. I begin with two sketches, one from my youth and one from my work with youth.
* * *
(1957) I grab the car keys off the kitchen table, tiptoe down the back stairs, take a deep breath of late August air, back the Dodge out of the garage, and creep between the rows of clapboard duplexes – the houses and people in them familiar by the steps I take to the grocery store and in games of kick the can.
At the end of the alley, I turn east. Burleigh Street is bathed in the warm glow of lights. A sole pigeon disappears beneath the hood and reappears eyeball to eyeball with me before flying off. The playground where I shoot buckets and the cemetery where my brother taught me to drive pass on the left.
Once I reach Lake Michigan, I park next to the pavilion, which sits on the bluffs like a balcony above nature’s great symphony, and get out. No one else is here. As a path from the moon runs across the black water to my feet and white capped waves pound the rocks along the shore beneath me I repeat the word pavilion, “pavilion, pavilion, pavilion,” until it loses meaning. Then chilled I drive down to the shore and park next to the breakwater where one by one the waves crash over the top of the car and wash down the sides, cocooning me in water with the lights from the ships on the horizon shining like diamonds through the windshield.
* * *
(1974) “30 all,” Bobby, 17, says.
"36 to 26, my favor.” I hunch over with my hands on his knees.
"No. 30 all, lets go, take it out!” Bobby snaps a bounce pass to me.
"30, 26.” I turn with the ball on my hip and walk to take it out of bounds, Bobby runs behind, bats the ball away, grabs it, charges the basket, takes two steps up the brick wall, leans out in front of the backboard, and dunks the ball.
I look out the ground level window. It’s a cold, grey, fall, Wisconsin day, 1976. Leaves have piled up against the grating. we’re in the small gym in the basement of the residential center for troubled boys, playing one-on-one basketball, or buckets as we call it.
"Let’s take a break.” I sit down on the scuffed wood floor.
Bobby spins the ball in his hands, stands above me.
“We’ll have to rake the leaves later,” I say.
"Not me.”
"I meant the other boys and me.”
Bobby used to live here. He’s returned to visit, and play some one-on-one.
"I always liked this little gym,” Bobby says.
“Why?”
“Because I can stuff.”
The basket in the rumpus room is eight feet high instead of the usual ten feet.
* * *
As a youth and as a youth worker I was constantly in motion. I was moving, doing something. Motion was always there at the edge of my consciousness. It was something I did, heard, and/or flowed between us that I could not quite understand, yet vital to knowing my experience and the experience of others. The titles of my novels were In Motion and Floating because this emphasized the meaning and importance of motion in work with youth. Put simply, we were more often than not in motion.
Sometimes I think of motion as the existential hum or a rumble beneath the surface that we often feel and hear, a life force perhaps? Motion is also, as Aristotle said, the mode in which the future and present are one, or perhaps a state in which we can be totally in the moment. And, then motion is just plain movement, or getting from here to there or nowhere, the movement without which it is impossible to imagine being alive.
I run everyday because I enjoy moving. Frequently, after the initial pain subsides and the endorphins kick in, I get the runners high. My activity and I are one. Time is lost and everything is in synch. I can go for several blocks and not remember the distance in between. You might also say it is my flow or optimal experience, and as such is a metaphor for how hard work leads to fulfillment in life.
When I feel connected to others motion is usually involved – for example, the shared rhythm of a conversation. We are doing something with each other: talking, working walking, dance, or running. “I am still happiest moving in Suzanne’s presence,” I write in one of my sketches about the woman I have lived and been friends with for many years.
Similarly, I was often connected to the troubled boys when we were running, swimming, or playing one on one basketball. I used to get a small group of them up early in the morning for a run. At first the pain made it difficult. Then as they got in shape, often we experienced a feeling of harmony in the middle of the run when we shared a common pace. Once the word spread other boys wanted to join in. They saw it as something special. Usually when we were lost in our motion, or enmeshed in an activity, we were in it together. I still remember those times as some of the most fulfilling times in my work. I liked the action and struggle in the work as well. With some fear and apprehension, of course, I felt alive in the midst of trying to resolve a physical struggle or restraint, or chasing a youth who was running away.
Rhythm, motion, and stillness are closely related. The rhythms of our motions as we seek resolution/stillness. Rhythmic interactions forge huge connections (Maier, 1992), and let us know when a struggle is ending – the tension in the arms, back and neck eases and subsides. As in modern dance, we line up and pass through, close or far, boundaries and human connections formed by our positioning, mirroring back, pauses, and ability to freeze ourselves in the timelessness of the moment. We are in and out of synch with youth and their developmental rhythms.
As a child I was always in motion. I felt a need to move. I ran from or to something. The murmur and hum always seemed to be there, just beneath the surface. Moving made me feel free at least for the moment. I often moved from one place or thing to another, one dream or fantasy to another, childhood to youth to adulthood and back. Usually this went smoothly but sometimes I did not want something to change or end, so I moved away, or avoided the transition. I went somewhere else, or did not show up. Or I sped up the transition by moving ahead or away from what I was doing.
The boys I worked with were not used to smooth transitions. Things usually went badly when they moved from one place or activity to another. Their histories of movement and transition had been filled with failure and rejection. They had moved from one home to another, from awake to sleep, sleep to awake, and crafts to dinner with some difficulty and fear. They did not have a normal sense of moving from one thing or place to another with relative ease and success, much less with moving from more challenging events to another. Learning to experience and master transitions was a big part of their care. Getting from here to there successfully without rejection, fights, abuse, failure or neglect helped them deal with change and separation.
I am often moving toward stillness. I move to find peace and quiet, or am drawn to a place of quiet and stillness such as the peace I find when I am exhausted after a run. I long to just be, or search for just so-ness – or, to just be. Or I am moving toward death, or to return to the womb. I like to be in a still place, empty of thought and worry, a place I find for which I have too little time. In the middle of a run I lose all contact sometimes with time and space. I am suspended, still, yet moving, just being. As a boy I stared at my feet or the wall until there was nothing. When I hurt inside, I felt better just being totally still, or numb. I stiffened my body on my bed until nothing moved. It was one way I had of coping.
Youth I think often run around, make noise, holler, and move to achieve similar states. They hear and try to rid themselves of the hum or rumble. Something moves inside them and they move to get away from it. Their anxiety is uncontrollable except when they run, fight, or lash out. Motion is a defense against the pain inside. Stillness is a dream, to be in a state of nothing, their heads and bodies rid of the thoughts and call to action that drive them to move and act the way they do. As a young boy my mother used to get concerned when I ran and hollered through the house for no apparent reason ... I understood this about the boys I worked with.
