Joyful Movement

I never thought I’d find inspiration in my diet app (I look to it as an accountability tool, at best), but the other day it used a phrase I was called to underscore when it urged me to engage in “joyful movement.”

My immediate visceral (gut) and emotional (heart) response was a lightening and a sense of relief at the notion that instead of working out, I might approach physical activity as an opportunity to simply enjoy moving my body throughout the day. After all, shouldn’t it feel good to make your heart beat a little faster; engage muscles, joints, and tendons; and take expansive breaths?

It then occurred to me to wonder whether exercising with a sense of joy—whether dancing, playing with children, walking in nature, or sincerely having fun doing more traditional gym-type activities (hey, it’s possible)—might have a better outcome. Kind of in the same way some say that playing music to plants helps them grow or thinking kind thoughts about water droplets form more symmetrical ice crystals (if you believe those sorts of things, which I do…because isn’t it beautiful to believe?).

No, I’m not suggesting that leaping around my yard after a clumsily-hit badminton birdie will have the same results on my stamina, flexibility, or muscle mass as a 45-minute circuit workout, but if I’m engaging in the latter only with the transactional mindset of “If I do these three sets of squats I’ll have a better butt”—and with no joy—is it really better? I think in the long run, the results for my whole being will be qualitatively different and more beneficial if I am moving with joy.

My next train of thought to roll up to the station was to consider “joyful movement” in the context of organizing for social change. adrienne marie brown and others are lifting up pleasure, joy, and rest as revolutionary, encouraging us to bring this beautiful difference to our movements to enhance both their sustainability and impact. Like exercise, our changemaking—when it’s approached solely as “work”—seems less whole than when we navigate it as a dance, finding in it the small ways to feel, taste, or glimpse the liberation we are seeking for all.

“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” 

Although Emma Goldman apparently never actually said that, she did write (about having been criticized by a colleague who judged her dancing at an event as too frivolous an activity for a serious agitator):

“I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. ‘I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.’ Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world—prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.”

She also wrote:

“There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another. This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.” 

Though she was addressing the issue of the use of violence as a revolutionary tool, the recognition that what you do and how you do it are inextricably linked also applies to the joy we bring to our movements.

May we all engage in “joyful movement” every day, both in our pursuit of truth, love, and justice and in our personal and collective health and self-care practices.