Move. Moving... and Movement

This past Thursday, my wife and I moved out of our house in Brooklyn. We now live upstate in New Paltz, New York, where she's a college professor. We're going to keep an apartment in Brooklyn so I can commute in once a week and keep working at the Feldenkrais Institute.

We're beyond the place where we rent a truck and move ourselves or beg our friends to help us. Fortunately, we've used a Brooklyn moving company a couple of times in the past and they were phenomenal—on time, honest, economical (for movers), very quick but still careful.

Although we used the same company, last Thursday was different from those other times. The movers arrived at 8:00 am, as promised, and we were entirely packed and ready to go. All they needed to do was wrap some furniture pieces and get it all into the truck. They showed up with four guys and past experience told me they'd be in the truck and on their way around noon, maybe 1:00 pm at the latest.

At around 10:00 am, two of the movers were sent to another job. They were gone before I knew they were leaving and when I asked the guy who was supervising our move, he assured me that two other guys were on their way over. But with only him and one other man working, things slowed down considerably. I began wrapping furniture myself and carrying things out to the truck. By noon, when no replacements had arrived I the office and spoke to a woman who gave me a heartfelt apology and assurances that replacements were "in transit." At two o'clock when help had still not arrived, I called again and spoke to the owner. Perhaps you can imagine, I was just a little perturbed at that point. He really is a nice guy, although at the time, I had no appreciation for that. He told me again that help was on the way and that "it would be made right" for me on the final bill. I said that would be nice but what I really wanted was to be finished moving before Friday. I got more apologies and, amazingly, a half hour later two more men showed up.

We finally left our house in Brooklyn at 5:00 pm. We stopped at a storage facility to drop a few things off that are going to the new Brooklyn apartment and left the city to go upstate at 6:00 pm, ten hours after we began. We still had to make a two-hour drive and then unload at our new place. I've been in better moods.

The two-hour drive took three because it was Thursday before a holiday week and we'd managed to hit rush hour at its height. We arrived at our new place at about 9:00 pm and things actually got a little better from there on. The movers had us unloaded by 11:15 pm and I managed to get into bed a little before 1:00 am.

We got back in the car at 7:00 am the next day to drive back to Brooklyn to close on the sale of our house. This seemed like pretty good planning when we'd anticipated saying good-bye to our movers around 6:00 pm the evening before. But under the circumstances, my mood wasn't improving.

I need to digress just a bit here to say that nine months ago when we at the Feldenkrais^®  Institute were planning our slate of workshops for 2012, it seemed like a great idea to me to teach a five-hour Feldenkrais workshop on Saturday, June 30^th. As I was driving back to New York at 8:00 am on five hours' sleep, having lugged boxes the entire day before, the thought of teaching all the following day made me want to shoot someone, mostly myself. But what are you going to do? (I don't much care for guns.)

I had been intelligent enough to arrange to stay with a friend on Friday night so I didn't have to drive back and forth to New Paltz again but I woke up at 6:30 am on Saturday with a sore back, a headache and a six-hour workshop that began before noon.

So, what did I do? After contemplating pretending to be ill or deliberately ingesting something that I knew would give me food poisoning, I did what any Feldenkrais practitioner would do. I did Feldenkrais work. I went over all the lessons I was going to teach in my workshop and although I abbreviated most of the work, by the end of the three hours I spent doing Awareness Through Movement^®, I felt immensely better. My back was no longer sore; my headache was gone; I felt awake, yet calm. I felt ready to do what I needed to do. The particular ATMs^® I did were irrelevant. I could have picked anything. What I needed and received from the Feldenkrais work was to be reminded of how much wasted energy I'd been expending, of how to move (and live) in a more efficient and pleasurable way, of how to breathe easily and in concert with every activity I undertake.

Even after doing Feldenkrais work for more than twelve years, I need these reminders over and over again. We all do. A process that continues to evolve in my thinking is that I look forward more and more to doing ATM, to the curative power of being reminded of what it's like to feel more human. And to be able to sense myself and the changes that occur within me in a finer and more detailed way as experience accrues. It's a process that I believe will continue for the rest of my life. I look forward to that, too.

By the way, the folks who came to the workshop on Saturday seemed to have a great time. And our new house in New Paltz is lovely. We've moved and we'll keep moving. So far, so good….