Movement: A Glossary
What does it mean to call something “moving”?
What does it mean to call something “moving”? There are moments of contact I have (with other people, with art, with nature) that I think of in these terms and it has little do with physical repositioning. These are moments were the thing I am observing feels like it reaches out and touches me. There is a reorientation, intellectually or emotionally, that shifts my perceptions, perhaps even my intuitions, if only for a moment. The mover doesn’t need to be grand and the movement does not need to be a leap. The important thing is simply that my default way of operating is disrupted.
This process often involves moving toward something. A great movie might move me to tears, but that is the outward manifestation of some deeper thing it is moving me towards: joy, sorrow, truth, etc. What I want to do is think about the various forms this movement can take, the psycho-spiritual impulses that movement provokes. Let us start with Joy.
Joy
A couple of months ago I sat on a garden bench just before dusk and the sunlight hit the lawn so that I could see the hundreds of spider webs that crisscrossed thousands of blades of grass. Presumably they are always there, except perhaps right after the gardener mows, but they were only revealed under a certain quality of light, by the choice of a certain bench, from a certain disposition towards attention. We live our lives mostly-unknowing about certain iridescent realities that are much like those spiderwebs, ever present, circumstantially visible. We are moved to Joy when the scales drop from our eyes and we can see that the world is bigger and better than we realized, that we are bound together, perpetually, unceasingly, iridescently
Delight
One afternoon, in the city I consider home, but had no home in at the time, I went to a man-made lake to find a bit of peace. My thoughts were tangling themselves into tight, recursive loops about the end of a previous relationship and the start of a new one. Though in one sense they were profoundly active, the consequence of that activity was to make me inert. I wrote for a long time and then looked into the lake and saw a fish emerge from a dark part of the water. It touched the surface for a moment, just enough to make a ripple, which reverberated for several long seconds until both the ripple and the fish disappeared. My thoughts unspooled. When Joy comes to me it is like light is cast on what has always been there. Delight is different, arriving in a shock of surprise, a temporary addition to the world that is destined to fade. Beautiful not despite, but because, it is momentary.
Sorrow
I want to give you another anecdote here, like the ones above, but my Sorrows either feel they do not belong enough to me or they are covered too deep in shame for me to be comfortable with them yet. So let me talk generally. When the unimaginable happens the left-behind are often inundated with matter: shared photos, homemade blankets, food. Detectable in this is the gravity of Sorrow, its accretionary tendency, which seems to me to come from our desire to out-smother the great smotherer. In that inexorable pull, in the tendency by which, as Kaveh Akbar says, “all bodies become sicker bodies,” we can find “grace only at the tattered edges.” One of those tattered edges is that in Sorrow we are, at least, unalone. And while this is a great fact of our lives, it is not the great fact, just one of many forms our unaloneness takes.
I’m not aiming to be encyclopedic so we will leave it there. This brief taxonomy is enough, I think, to produce a sense of what “moving” means. It seems that being moved involves a pulling back of the veil. It involves a displacement that helps to dispel the weight we put on the self. It reveals our conditional, contingent nature, and it points to the deeper and wider truths that undergird our lives.