Pare Down to Essential Actions
– Untitled painting by G.R. Iranna
One time while traveling in New Mexico to deliver a workshop, I fell off of a curb I didn’t see in the dark and badly injured my ankle. Very badly. “Complete disruption” of all the tendons and ligaments and a fracture in my talar joint. That is bad. And impressive, really, for just missing a curb. I am evidently an overachiever.
I somehow delivered the workshop and then hobbled home from that trip. I spent many months in a walking boot after I was approved to put weight on it. The very next weekend, I was to lead a retreat in the mountains of North Carolina. I spent that weekend planning my movements very carefully so I could limit my time navigating stairs or making trips to my room which was downstairs in the lodge. I thought very carefully about whether I actually needed to move from my chair. I bundled errands so I could make one trip rather than three. I only went to the bathroom when it was absolutely necessary. Peeing became a strategic decision. This happened to me after heart surgery as well. And also when I sliced the edge of a finger off while using a mandolin to cut carrots. Lots of strategic decisions about necessary and unnecessary movement to minimize pain. New ways to hold myself, limitations on what I could and couldn’t do.
Two weeks ago, during a writing retreat I was hosting virtually, my laptop died. In mid sentence as I was talking. I quickly brought up Zoom on my phone and continued. Since then, I have been using my phone for everything—typing this document, for example. I have learned to minimize moving parts or complex actions because I don’t know how to do them on my phone or can’t do them without a lot of angst on a tiny keyboard and screen. Things seem harder and also freeing; I am slowed by this just as my ankle injury slowed me.
And in the process, I have noticed more. I type with my left index finger and right thumb, for example. I hadn’t really noticed that before. I avoid attachments and links when possible. I hate using Zoom on my phone. I find myself paring down to the minimal. To essential actions only.
I think there is something meaningful about this. The slowness is luxurious. The lack of excessive typing is just like the lack of excessive walking after injuring my ankle. I also did this when Feliks transitioned, first avoiding pronouns altogether by reconstructing sentences in my head to eliminate them, then by consciously making the pronoun change in my mind before speaking, and now I use the correct pronouns effortlessly. I slowed myself down to get there.
Once in a workshop for about 200 people, we had participants individually choose a movement that would demonstrate their daily work – and then exaggerate it as if they were on an opera stage and everything had to be BIG. This was all done in silence.
Silently, customer service reps walked around the room as if they were answering huge phones, then holding them out from their ear as they mimed talking by moving their mouths in wide, exaggerated motions. The folks from the mailroom pretended to stamp things and rip things open and push a huge trolley around, delivering mail. The magazine staff pretend-typed in large motions, raising their arms way up to bang on a huge, invisible keyboard. Interestingly, some jobs were difficult to translate into actions, like the CEO, but I left him to figure that out and what he learned from that. If you tried to do this, what would your essential action be?
When asked one day what her mom does for a living, my then-first grade daughter answered, “she’s a typer.” And I have to say, I was. What she saw me do was type. What I was doing was writing books, but boil it down to its essential actions and I’m a typer as she saw it, raising my arms way up to bang on a keyboard.
I am again paring my days down to essential actions to see what remains. I am moving more slowly. I am noticing. I am leaving the extraneous bits behind. It feels good. It feels, paradoxically, expansive, rather than reductive.
