Gesture

The literature on nonverbal communication is stuffed full of research into the link between gestures and speech. And lately I've noticed that my favorite fidgets and my favorite ideas all have to do with finding unstable balance points.

My students must get sick to death of hearing about dialectical tensions, but most of the academic notions that fascinate me the most are some sort of variation on that. Between kindness and cruelty, which is the good one and which one do we want to minimize? Easy: kindness is good, and we should minimize cruelty. But between, say, sleep and being awake, which is the good one and which one do we want to minimize? They're both good, but each one is the negation of the other, so we have to figure out what balance to strike between them. And we can't do it once and for all, because our need for each changes with circumstance. That's a short run through the idea of dialectical tension. It's a big idea in relational communication: relational partners want both time together and separation, both familiarity and spontaneity, both openness and secrecy. And the balance of each has to be continually renegotiated, and it's the renegotiation that is the lifeblood of the relationship. The idea pops up in a number of other places, and every time it does, it tickles my curiosity just perfectly. I often woolgather about it when I'm out walking.

The other thing I do aimlessly is fidget, and it struck me this morning that most of my commonest fidgets are about balance. I balance on one foot and swing the other one around. I balance books on my third finger and spin them, just like a basketball player with a basketball. I twirl pens through my fingers and around my thumb, which works best with pens that balance easily, and might not work at all with poorly balanced ones.

There's no end of aphorisms about the importance of balance, and most of it just makes me impatient. I'm not at all drawn to the abstraction in those sayings. It's the experience of hitting a tricky balance just right that pleases me. It feels like mastering the arrangement that truly makes a difference in the world. Far more than marshaling brute strength, I think that grasping the multiple interacting forces and learning to maintain balance between them, even as they change, is what it takes to be the source of influence more than the target.