As Fred Astaire crooned to Ginger Rogers — “The way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea, the memory of all that, no, no they can’t take that away from me. “ Simple actions are memorable. According to Mabel Ellsworth Todd, “It is not our parents’ faces that come back to us, but their bodies, in the accustomed chairs, eating, sewing, smoking, doing all the familiar things. We remember each as a body in action.”
We all have a preferred way of being in the world, and we embody this. Our identities rest, much more that we believe, on the repetition of characteristic movements. How we sit, how we stand, the cadence of our steps, habitual actions. and recurring gestures – these are as unique as our fingerprints.
Bodily behaviors matter. We disturb others, and we disturb ourselves, when we move in unfamiliar ways. And yet, these perturbations remind us of something important. As Esalen founder Michael Murphy writes, “ We live only part of the life we are given. Growing acquaintance with once-foreign cultures, new discoveries about our subliminal depths, and the dawning recognition that each social group reinforces just some human attributes while neglecting or suppressing others have stimulated a worldwide understanding that all of us have great potentials for growth.”
Growth requires moving beyond habit. But what kind of effort is required to overcome habits, especially those that we have forgotten we have?