Let the Soul Dangle

As a man in his 60's I've started going to the gym, not for my cardiovascular health, I get that riding my bike and hiking, but to try to stave off the steady decrease in muscle mass that tends to occur as we age. This means weight lifting. I'm never going to be a body builder, but I'm beginning to enjoy the feeling of greater strength. As a New Year's task, I undertook the dreaded garage which involved shifting a stack of cinder blocks from one place to another. I really felt it then.

Building muscle is a process of flexing then relaxing, flexing then relaxing. You don't need weights to do it: isometric exercise does a similar thing.

When my wife and I lived in Germany, I learned the idiom "die Seele baumeln lassen," which translates into English as "let the soul dangle." It was an expression often used in regards to an upcoming weekend: After the workweek, I'm just going to let my soul dangle.

Humans have the habit of comparing our brains to machines. The French philosopher and scientist René Descarte felt that brains must function like the impressive hydraulic machinery that were all the rage during the 17th century. There were those who have compared our brain functions to clockworks, to electrical systems, and, today, we find ourselves constantly comparing our thought processes to the workings of computers.

Having spent the past couple decades observing children at play, asking and answering their own questions, following their curiosity, I've come to the realization that our minds are more like muscles than machines. Periods of intensity, when allowed to flow naturally through play, are inevitably followed by periods during which their souls must dangle: flexing and relaxing, flexing and relaxing, the way muscles do at the gym. We recognize this every time we take a child into a calming place when they get too wound up. They need the time and space for their brain-muscle to relax before they can flex again.

Machine metaphors for what makes us uniquely human have always rubbed me the wrong way if only because, as products of the human mind, machines are designed to do certain things better, or at least more efficiently, than humans can do them unaided. That's why we invented the machines in the first place. Any comparison between the two will always find the human lacking, not because the machine is superior, but rather because we've outsourced certain mundane or labor-intensive projects to them. We've built them to work relentlessly, steadily, and without pause because we cannot. We built them to free ourselves, their masters, to relax our brains before flexing them again on something else.

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

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