Move

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake,” Robert Louis Stevenson once remarked. “The great affair is to move.” It is a beautiful and even stunning realization to see that everything is moving already, without exception, all the time—from the tiniest conceivable molecules and quarks, to the most massive celestial objects coasting through the cosmos. Stillness is the great illusion. For those with a bothered mind, caught up in a frantic lifestyle and the frenetic pace of a digital age, stillness is also the great seductress: teasing and tempting us to believe in the myth of the calm, leading us on a wild goose chase for something we are not meant to know, a fiction contradicting the very nature of being and becoming. Seeing through this illusion is unsettling but liberating. And once freed from the incessant search for a quiet mind, detached being, and the unrippled life, we may finally grant ourselves the kindness of letting loose and letting go to join the eternal dance already asway. We may learn that moving is soothing. And deeply familiar. Harkening back to our first intimations of connection and belonging, a reality we knew in the womb, we might be reminded, if not in memory, then in our bodies, of the maternal and almost magical way we were embraced on all sides by an oasis of subtle rhythms; rolling, rocking, massaging, caressing, and gently acquainting us with the elemental motions of earth, life, and everything, a fundamental move that is both our birthright and our destiny.

When we experience trauma, heartbreak, or the loss of a loved one, moving is one of the great consolations readily available to us. In such moments of suffering, some might notice themselves swaying, or rocking themselves unintentionally. We can also feel called to walk, wander, or travel. I once knew a man who lost his wife of fifty-nine years. The passing was devastating, and afterwards he did not know what to do with himself. Unable to sleep one night, he got out of bed, jumped in his car, and began to drive. And he did not stop driving, until twelve hours and several hundred miles later he arrived at the coast, and could not drive any farther. Unable to shed a single tear up until this time, despite the weight of the loss, his journey had afforded him some levity as he sat down on the sand, shaking, and sobbed uncontrollably. Sometimes, something as absolutely simple, physical, and primal as moving is just what a broken heart needs, a kind of embodied solace through alignment with the fact that we all move, and move on.

Life is perpetually aflutter, our days strewn with dynamism. Structurally, nothing is static. We journey, whether we want to or not. To be is to move.