Hi, it’s Brilliant.
A few years ago I got certified in MovNat. The name is short for natural movement. It’s a fitness method built on the things humans do naturally, like crawling, balancing, lifting, carrying, and throwing.
One of those movements is the inverted crawl. You sit, put your hands on the floor behind you, lift your hips, and walk. Opposite hand, opposite foot. It looks like a child’s crab walk.
At first it’s like trying to pat your head and rub your belly at the same time. That’s the easy part. If you spend many hours at a desk, like I do, it works muscles you probably don’t use very often. It gets agonizing fast.
I recently added it back to my workouts. The goal was the length of my hallway and back. For days I couldn’t make it one way without a rest.
Then one morning I decided: today I go there and back without a rest, no matter what. It was going well. I was about 80 percent of the way down the hall.
And I stopped.
About 60 seconds earlier, I had decided to finish, no matter what. If the house had been on fire, I would have kept going. (Okay, I would have stood up and run, but you know what I mean.) My body had more. But something said rest, and I rested.
I still can’t tell you whether that was weakness or wisdom.
I met that same moment again and again writing Reclaiming Prayer. I’d decided in advance to be at my desk from 7 to 9 each morning. That got me into the chair. It didn’t tell me what to do once the work got hard. Some mornings I pushed through. Some mornings I stopped. I can’t say I always chose right.
Years ago I read The Secret Race, by the cyclist Tyler Hamilton. He once rode a three-week race on a broken bone. He clenched his jaw so hard against the pain that he ground eleven teeth down to the nerves. In the book he writes, “I’m good at pain.” He was.
I’ve always thought of myself as good at pain too. But that didn’t settle anything in the hallway. Being able to keep going doesn’t mean I should.
Weakness or wisdom. When it gets hard, I still can’t always tell which is which. So I pray. Sometimes that’s how I find out what’s called for. Sometimes it’s just how I keep going.
From the Commonplace Book
“If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.” — Bruce Lee, as recalled by his student Stirling Silliphant
Further Down the Rabbit Hole
MovNat is Erwan Le Corre’s system of natural movement. Its premise is that you already know how to move this way and have mostly forgotten. No machines. You crawl, balance, climb, lift, carry. The inverted crawl is a fine place to start, and your hallway will do.
I interviewed Erwan in 2019. He told me about an agreement he’d made with himself: “I refuse to be hurried.” At the end I told him I wanted to get certified. Then I did.