One of the big challenges of online work is how easily we become disembodied. We get stuck staring at our screens, as if rooted to our chairs. The only exercise we get is moving our fingers over the keyboard.
But we’re embodied creatures, and this isn’t good for us.
One of the themes of our Naked Facilitator workshops is using activities that get participants moving – with games, exercises, breaks. Sometimes just a 30 second stretch makes a difference.
These activities help maintain energy, but they’re also linked to the much broader subject of “embodied cognition”. This is a fancy way of saying that our intelligence is not confined to our brains but is vested in our bodies and the ways we connect to the the people and spaces around us.
There’s a deep dive into this subject in this article: The Body as Mediator. It challenges “the ‘solutionism’ that radiates outwards from Silicon Valley, in which human lives are interpreted as a series of problems to be solved through sophisticated analysis of data.”
It offers a richer picture of what happens when we work together. Something more significant than rearranging notes and images on a shared screen:
“What we encounter through embodied perception is this crisscrossing of lateral, overlapping relations with other people, other creatures and other things – an expressive space that exists between lived bodies. It’s not that we are all ‘one’, but that we inhabit a world in which, to quote the philosopher Glen Mazis, ‘things, people, creatures intertwine, interweave, yet do not lose the wonder that each is each and yet not without the others”
If that’s a bit too wordy for you, you might enjoy this exercise from the article. Press your two hands together and ask yourself, which hand is touching, and which one is touched?
If you’re like us, you’ll feel something when asking that question. Something you can’t put into words. The author argues that “This ambiguity extends to our exchanges with other people. Imagine two teenagers, close friends, on a long walk along the coastline on a summer’s evening. Their hands brush against each other; but who touched whom, or whether there was even any intent at all, might not be clear – and this kind of ambiguity will always infuse our social interactions at some level.”
Powerful things happen when we meet, many of which are not a mere exchange of information.
Thanks to our friend, Jon Husband, for spotting this article.