Body Extremes

A few months ago I decided to take on a 9-5 writing position at a desk. “It’ll be great!” I thought. I was excited at the prospect of landing a serious sounding job entitled “writer/researcher,” and placing it on my resume.

As a performer I often took on jobs that required loads of movement. From teaching movement classes, dancing and performing, there wasn’t much time during the day where I sat at a desk, let alone in a chair. My latest stint, working in a busy midtown restaurant, forced me to be on my feet all day long for ungodly hours. A switch to Sketcher Shape Up shoes helped my body to not be in complete pain at the end of the night (more on these in a later post), though a growing fear still mounted in anticipation of the day when spider veins would explode all the way down my weary, lactic acid filled calves.

So you can imagine my relief and excitement in making the switch to this more conventional, relaxed “writer/researcher,” position. 

A funny thing happened on day two of beginning this new job, however. As I rushed to leave the office and jump onto the subway car home, tears began to stream down my face on the platform. No, I did not like this new job and its lack of creativity, but these silent tears seemed to be indicating something even deeper than that. I realized suddenly the extreme shock I was giving to my body. Just two days ago I was running around like a chicken with its head cut off, and now I was sitting for a period of eight hours in one spot. 

I had joined the cubicle forces and was dealing with a common office virus formerly unknown to me: the virus of sedentary motion.

This felt as unhealthy to me as the constant vertical motion of my previous job. In desperation I developed a phenomenon known as the “15 minute dance party,” a term coined for the moment at the end of the day when I burst into my apartment and danced my a$@ off to the loudest music I could find.

It was then that I realized how many bizarre positions we place our bodies in everyday. How many extremes we force them to endure and how little we allow them to move the way they naturally move. Repetitive actions and neglect to exercise can cause our bones to calcify and our muscles to freeze into an improper alignment. And this alignment when unchecked can cause severe damage to our health and emotional states.