we wouldn’t be sitting up in chairs, we’d be flopped onto the floor like corpses. Our proprioceptive senses and core muscles are in a constant dance of dynamic equilibrium. We perceive where our bodies are, we perceive our relationships with the people and objects around us, and we adjust accordingly.
In the same way, we are able to walk, bicycle, drive a car, dance. This is the wisdom of the self-adjusting body. Steering a car, we continually guide it right and left in order to go straight. We do not castigate ourselves for making a mistake each time we wiggle the wheel. We simply notice the error and adjust for it. Inevitably we will lose our balance, fall over, make mistakes, and get into accidents. How do we respond? With guilt and self-punishment? Or with self-acceptance, which encourages another attempt and more practice, allowing us to respond to emergencies smoothly and realistically? Self-correction is a lot easier without the added burden of guilt.
Wunder reminds us that when toddlers fall, they don’t need to be told that they fell. We trust that they know what is happening as it happens, that they receive feedback as the experience unfolds. Our bodies and minds, our partnerships with others, are self-organizing systems. The mechanisms of feedback, communication, self-correction, self-organization, by which toddling evolves into graceful interaction, are fundamental to life, as revealed in the sciences of systems theory.
Every person reading this is an ex-toddler. We retain (consciously or unconsciously) an immense amount of experience from this life stage of falldown-getup, falldown-getup, falldown-getup. Nelson Mandela once said that he wanted to be judged not by what he accomplished but by how many times he fell down and got up again.
Improvising is trial and error smoothly flowing. For that to work, error has to be free from clenching or regret, so that our learning process can swing easily from each step to the next. The more we accept mistakes as part of the natural flow of our activity, the more we will be able to incorporate them, use them to build stronger and more interesting structures. In the flow of music, the “bad” note can be deliberately repeated, now as a bridge to something new, building a new modulation around it. Our partners can pick it up and toss it around in a freshly expanded game.
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