I pull on my boots and lace them up, sitting on a step at the back door. I’m pondering what I’m doing, what I’m wondering about. And it’s all about walking, talking, thinking. This is a progression, developed in us in our first years, before the age of three, during that time we cannot remember when so much happens. I picture some of the children I have known in their first years — my own, and those of my friends — recalling wondrous deeds…
For instance, learning to walk. Watch how a child pulls itself upright — in fact seems to be impelled upright, raised into uprightness by an immense yet focused intent — to grasp intuitively the relationship of equilibrium and movement, first in the legs, and then in every step, and then in the free possibilities offered to the hands. In these events I discern the intimate relationship between the inwardly active senses of balance and of movement, awakened in this first independent achievement of the child in establishing its presence in physical space.
Then consider — maybe knowing the basics of linguistic theory — the relationship between hand movement and the speech centre in Broca’s region (for a right-handed child, in the left hemisphere of the brain). Note the child’s eloquent gestures in learning to speak. Witness this search for words, how they are found with fluid but continually arrested movements of the hands. We might observe how the child’s firm rhythmical steps engender well-formed sentence structures, both clearly articulated and modulated. Previously, the child had words — but now, once free to move, he or she seems inspired with language. And in this cloud-burst of language-inspiration, syntax (word order) indicates relationship (between subject and object, for instance), and is the soul’s equivalent of the body’s experience of equilibrium and movement. Through speaking and listening, the child learns to feel itself aware in soul space.
Similarly, when thinking then arises inwardly as a reflection of the outer world and all its processes, this also is an experience of the relationship of equilibrium and movement, this time in consciousness. Thinking is speech turned inward through the encounter with the world, to wonder, and to form images of experience. We then become aware simultaneously of ‘self’ and ‘other’ — but in this duality are the seeds of a higher synthesis in thinking. Through this ability to mirror experience in consciousness, the child begins to perceive itself in what we can call a kind of spirit space.
And therefore to remember its experience. These are big ideas, but as I set out on my walk into the forest across the road, I sense the small applications, and thus the reality of such concepts — as I pause to speak, as I fall silent into thoughts. I notice how the walking does connect me with the world, the talking with my companion, the thinking with myself.
