#74 – A QUESTION OF BALANCE – UMBERTO TUNESI

Umberto TunesiMost of us, when practicing sports, either professionally or just to keep fit – perhaps with the exception of ballet – tend to prioritize both quick movements and muscular power.

We seldom care for slow, delicate movements especially if we’re males, we want – or need? – Males tend to want to move harshly and powerfully.

MOVEMENT
Just like a little child, who can hardly walk and for fear of falling, runs to feel himself in balance.

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” (Albert Einstein)

When I was at school, gym exercises were not aimed at making or keeping us fit, but at finding out the fittest among us.

And when – as an adult – I was doing sports as an amateur, under trainers’ supervision – tennis, swimming, cross-country skiing and once more gym – their aims really weren’t fitness, that is doing the right thing the right way, but being quick and strong, instead.

Even yoga, its shirshasana upside down pose, was more a question of ability.

GETTING OLD
Now that we’re growing old, in the gyms we go to cure backache, osteoporosis, etcetera.   And, we’re told to move slowly and gently as much as we can.

We’ve to unlearn what we’ve been told for decades and we find that’s difficult, even painful.  We’re too used to move quickly, to exercise muscular power.

We’ve to learn to prioritize to feel our body, instead, to listen to it.  Moving slowly, like in the tai chi discipline, helps building a more thorough knowledge of our body, of how it works, of how it’s organized.

When we move slowly, and we’re aware of its movements.  Our body sends to our brain an infinite number of infinitesimal messages, each of which has a meaning.

TV often proposes to us what is scantily perceptible the movements in our planet structure and its animal and vegetal life.

How much are most of us aware of such “movements”?

These also occur in the organizations we pretend to know and to control, daily and perhaps many times a day. They are under our eyes but we don’t see them, we don’t hear them screech.

It’s like with our sons and daughters.  We see them in the cradle, crying, and then – all of a sudden – they’re adult teens in front of us.

Anyone fond of films like Entrapment or Mission Impossible has seen how difficult – and painful – is to move carefully and slowly.  The same happens to the men – and possibly women – getting rid of unexploded weapons or mines.  And let’s think of surgeons, especially brain surgeon.

These people – or characters – must perform the almost impossible task of penetrating an environment and modifying it without disturbing it.

May be our organizations are not such delicate devices or organisms, nevertheless the odds to preserve quality and prevent adverse risk effects are not much different, in terms of impact potential.

As I write this piece – in these last days of December, 2014, worldwide news are crowded with accidents – air and sea – that should never have occurred.

Hopefully, some past events and the Standards coming into force – that should be based on such events – should teach us to be more aware of the little, almost insignificant events, that we’ve long neglected.

“Though the elephant might have given birth to a mouse, a birth is still – and will always be – a birth.”

(*) The Moody Blues’s sixth album, released 1970.

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