Pick a sport or physical endeavor of almost any kind. My personal choice is running, but any regular movement will do. The catches include: a) it has to make you aware of your body in ways that differ significantly from lying on the couch; b) when you’re done, you’re glad you did it, preferably in spite of yourself; c) you notice a difference in the way you think and behave after you do this thing.
Walk, hike, ski, bike, do a little yoga, stack and re-stack all the heaviest of your coffee-table books. Choose something laughably humble where possible. It must be sustainable. Then: do it at least three times each week. For years, or, preferably, decades.
When your body becomes known to you, thoroughly and over time, because of and by way of its functionality rather than its appearance, you are less likely to take it for granted, harm it, hate it, or engage in any of the other completely insane activities our culture would like us to engage in because when we do, it makes more money for people who already have lots of money.
Buck the system. Through whatever movement is possible for you to enjoy long-term, you are more likely to begin to take joy from the having of a body.
And from a place of joy, it is more easily possible to do things like make short films in which you play all roles and have neither showered nor dressed for the day.
Become humbled. Get your ass kicked. This might be by CHILDREN, disease, bad luck, past trauma, injury, loss, grief, failure, divorce, aging, natural disaster, societal inequity, etc. Get to the point where your ass is so kicked you don’t care much anymore what people think because you don’t have the bandwidth for it. Find out that there is too much delight, wonder, and efficacy on the other side of our tender, adolescent, preoccupied worry (that perennial worry about what lunch table we’ll sit at) to not make the leap clear over the vinyl-topped cafeteria table, spraying cheese doodles as we go.
Become humble not in the “here’s some cute, shame-based diffidence because you might like me more if I make myself smooth and small” kind of way, but in the “hey, it turns out I’m not that big a deal after all! Now there’s so much room for everything else!” kind of way. Another version of this sentiment is take yourself less seriously.
That’s how you will manage to keep the clip of you pushing vegetables around the floor with your face as part of the film you put on the internet.
Locate your spontaneity. This takes practice since we have largely been trained out of it (for understandable reasons: if our parents didn’t come down on us a little hard about adventures with ketchup and eggs in our hair, just as they were finally about to put us in our car-seats after two hours of packing and prepping, for example, they might actually die of the lesser-known but pervasive Constant Cleaning Syndrome).
Another way of expressing this point is to say don’t miss the bus. You know that moment when you’re SO sleepy, but you decide to just watch one more episode? And then you’re wide awake? Well, that’s you missing your Sleep Bus. You heard it coming, you saw it stop and open its door with a welcoming, hydraulic hiss, and you waved it on, and now you’re stranded in awake-land. The same goes for spontaneity, or initiative, or giddyup— whatever you may call it: when the opportunity comes, the idea springs up, the will to act suddenly sprouts forth from the parched earth of daily life, do not think. Just do.
This is how you will trust that it’s a great idea to dodge neighbors while you run naked in the snow, your phone filming you all the while, its tiny electronic gleam still nestled in the rapidly escaping warmth of the kitchen as you approach the far hedge-row.
Take an acting class, even though you don’t intend to be an actor. Spend six semesters playing, learning the human condition, painstakingly identifying your emotional patterns in all human weathers, teeing up desired behaviors, learning authenticity, messing around with that authenticity, becoming vibrantly alive to other humans’ communications to you and their effects on you, preparing meticulously so you can do pretty much anything at the drop of a hat, embodying an angry parrot on stage, and so forth.
This will help when it comes to sucking on a pink pacifier and throwing plates of food for your film.
Get therapy. Preferably damned good therapy, and for years, if not decades.
After just forty years or so of living a combination of these things, you will find, miraculously, and not in any form you could have imagined, that you were free all along.
The climb into the oven though 😅 This is amazing!
I LOVE this. Just wish I could be born again with you as my coach. Eleanor's comment is great.
The video is hilarious and brilliant. Watched it over and over.