Unclenching
Pretend we're kids again.
It’s playtime. I reach for my favourite toy, but something unexpected messes with me. Some other kid's hand suddenly appears from the side and nudges mine, fudging my movement. I adapt and continue: I really want my toy. Maybe I get it. Sometimes the other kid does.
Similar incidents repeat several times over a few days of preschool. Meanwhile, an adult watches from across the room. She notices that whenever the other kid is around, I tense up a bit, my movements a little more jerky, furtive.
Have you ever played with one of these? Then you'd know their trick: once you put your fingers in, you can't simply pull them out. But that's probably what you'd try, your first time playing with one. It makes sense. Pulling is effective for many cases of trapped fingers—the usual situations you'd seen before. You pull, and the trap tightens as it lengthens. It grips your fingers harder, and they won't come out! Ugh.
Now here's the interesting part: just like you have an action (pull) ready to exploit when your fingers are trapped, you also have a "meta-action" ready when you encounter frustration: try harder. At first, you pull even harder.
Of course, you eventually learn that the only clean way out is to relax. To fall apart. To see and act anew.
Have you ever watched for just how long someone can be stuck?
One recent summer afternoon, I visited some friends, parents of a 4-year-old daughter. We were eating and talking on the deck behind their house with a few others. At first, mom and daughter were away.
After a couple of hours, they returned. But daughter was scared to come into the backyard and up onto the deck. Mom, who is one of the most understanding and gentle people I've met, carries daughter up onto the deck and sits with her for a while. The entire time, she's burying her face and half-crying, begging to be carried inside. Mom says she's free to go in, but she won't be carried. Mom reminds her that the rest of us are harmless. She doesn't seem to believe it.
Eventually she gets tired and goes in. For a time, she sneaks glances at us from the window. Before long, she comes back out and plays on the trampoline with her older brother, apparently unworried.
Somehow, at some point, she forgot to hold onto her fear.
Near the beginning of the pandemic, I consumed a neuroscience paper I couldn’t quite digest. Before long, I was ruminating1 on philosophy.
On the surface, the paper asked how we can move our limbs effectively when under the influence of unpredictable forces. But the results nudged me toward a deeper principle, one I'd noticed in myself and suspected in everyone, obvious in the movements of our bodies but also those of our minds.
For a time, the principle was nameless and unspoken. Then, after chewing for a while on visions of muscles, I settled on a metaphor: clenching.
I wasn't the first.
Also in 2020, someone publicly wrote about a seemingly different topic (but really, pointing in the same direction) and dropped "unclench". I read their post in July 2023.
I was disturbed.
Now I’ll reach for my favourite toy… but the other kid grabbed it first!
I'd wanted to write about these things myself! Some part of me wants to control, to own the act of explaining. To be original. To be the first to say.
In light of this catastrophe, why should I even keep playing?!
How clenchy of me! How utterly locked in. How caught by myself, leaning into a strategy that’d never see me try something fresh outside.
No longer. Time to head back out!
Maybe you’ll catch me on the trampoline.
What does grasping a toy in my hand have to do with philosophy? Or, with the thoughts I sometimes can’t stop myself from thinking? What will happen to me, if I let go?
Let’s explore something old, wild, and deep. But new to your mind, perhaps… still new enough to mine.
Continue with the next part of this series!
Rumination was so unoriginal by the end of 2020 that one might be tempted to call it the Year of Rumination. But it turns out the Chinese zodiacal Year of the Ox was 2021, while 2020 was the rat, decidedly not a ruminant!
I do like the “rat” flattery, though. Maybe the zodiac intends to compliment me that I have mastered worrying?
minor note: this first post doesn't link to part 2 at the end rn