Repetitive Stress
Discovering and transforming cycles of action
In last week’s note I briefly described my cycle – this particular way of acting that formed out of my own unique combination of training, experience, personality, and ideas. Upon hitting my wall, I realized that I was caught in a kind of cyclical repetition, and I couldn’t think my way out of it. I reached out for help.
Through counseling I was able to take time to inquire about my own formation. What made me into who I was? True or not, I saw myself as someone who continually self-destructed, and I didn’t want to be that kind of person anymore. Hitting walls had never been as dramatic as the in the fall of 2019, but my cycle was showing itself.
Repetition is a key aspect of training in tap dance land. There are steps that I’ve probably executed over 10,000 times. I train so that my body can execute movements without much conscious effort. My body remembers. I can then rely on this physical memory when it comes time to perform. Training for improvisation takes things even deeper. Instead of focusing on the repetition of movements, I’m focusing on the repetition of ideas, connections between context and action, and underlying intent, that all lead to the output. That output is not something that I pre-determine. It is something that is discovered in the moment-by-moment choice making that occurs when I am improvising. The practice of repetition in all of this is key.
The practicing of improvisation is akin to the experience of Bill Murray’s character in the movie Groundhog Day. It is the intentional repetitive experience of almost the same context, while experimenting with different choices. What’s the goal? To gain a sense of deep connection with the context, the other players, the underlying intent, and the audience, in the moment. This connection breeds trust that whatever choice I make in the moment will be good.
In tap dance land the most stable context, that is the framework in which I improvise, is that of a song. There are songs that I’ve danced to hundreds of times. The same song played over and over again. Never in quite exactly the same way, and never with the same dancing. I am experimenting.
This experimenting has been going on for me, for a while. I began to seriously pursue the practice of improvisation at the age of twelve. The pursuit was jumpstarted for me by my first time improvising in public at the Tap Jam at La Cav, a basement jazz club on the Upper East Side of New York City. This session, hosted by Jimmy Slyde, brought together some of the best tap dancers in New York City. It was THE place to be if you were a tap dancer or a fan of the craft.
By bearing witness to master improvisers like Slyde in real life, I gained a small understanding of the journey that was before me. I began to see the mountain I had to climb to become the kind of tap dancer I wanted to become. I began studying tunes, learning about the music, the dynamic of the band stand, and how to tap dance in the midst of it all.
For the foreseeable future I would train myself in the techniques of improvisation. I would develop familiarity with different contexts: jazz clubs, theatres, back rooms at a pub, etc. I would learn tons of tunes. I would begin to trust my body with technical abilities and choice making. That is, until I couldn’t trust it anymore.
Repetitive Stress
Many people ask if I’ve ever been injured as a tap dancer. While I’ve sustained plenty of injuries, I’ve never had an impact injury (broken bone, fracture, sprain, etc.) because of tap dancing. The physical stress of tap dancing comes from the repetitive nature of the training. Our bodies are miraculous adapters. Do something enough and the body adapts to the activity. This core ability to adapt is why our bodies can build and lose strength or increase and decrease in flexibility. It’s amazing.
However, our bodies (aside from signals of pain) do not really know good from evil. They are only trainable. Our bodies trust our minds and what we think is good or evil to do. That means that our bodies can adapt into an injury. This kind of injury is normally called a repetitive stress injury. Do something enough times and you might end up hurting yourself. Not because of the probability of falling, tripping, or bumping into something, but on account of the compounding effects of the activity itself.
The challenge for any intense pursuit is to understand what is good and evil in it. This is key, as the repetitive nature of the pursuit will compound whatever is good and evil. The good will lead one closer to their goal, the evil will lead one further away from who they were meant to be in it. We aren’t only talking about the physicality of it all.
Repetitive stress may be applied to the inner parts of the person, too. What happens when a person keeps repeating a particular thought or emotion? What about desires that compound into obsessions? What about a personality that keeps feeding itself, never broadening through interaction with others? These kinds of repetitions of context (the sameness of the inner person) will lead to repetitions of actions – a cycle.
A cycle is a particular set of actions – choices, really – that tend to lead to similar outcomes. Cycles are not inherently evil. In my case, my cycle involved high personal expectations, a desire for achievement, and need for creative outlets. These all have ways of being good, unless they become ends in and of themselves. Without a more powerful sense of being, all this doing could take over a person’s life. And without me really realizing it, it totally did with me. My high personal expectations, need for achievement, and continual output, all of which were celebrated in my work life, landed me in a completely unhealthy state.
No one who cared about me wanted me to land there. I didn’t either. But I didn’t realize the power of the formation I had gone through my entire life. It made me into a particular kind of person for whom hitting a wall was highly likely. I discovered that external variables, like my social relationships and geography, could play a role in all of this, too. Where could I begin to change my course?
Interrupting the Cycle
One of the wonders I find in humans is the ability to experience transformation – full and complete. It can happen, but not without work. I must lean on my very basic understanding of spiritual things here, to paint the clearest picture of my recent journey. Much of what I know in this area began with exposure to the ideas of spiritual formation presented by Dallas Willard (and more recently Richard Foster and Eugene Peterson), are rooted in the reality of a living God and Jesus Christ, and has been tested with personal experience.
In the process of transformation there are things that I can do and things only God can do. I must do what I can do, regardless of how little or meaningless it may seem, and trust God to do what He can do. Sometimes, I’ve mixed these up. I have not realized that the thing I was praying for was something that I could go ahead and do, while the thing I was trying to do was something only God could do.
I cannot change my thoughts by thinking harder or better, for example. However, I can begin to slow the connection between my mind and my body so that my thoughts don’t immediately lead to action. I cannot eliminate a desire simply by an act of will, but can make choices, like where I place my attention, that can starve that desire, making it less potent. The complete changing of thoughts or elimination of a particular desire is an act of God.
At the beginning of the process of transformation, what I can do looks like a kind of interruption. An interruption of action. Interrupt the capturing of my attention. Interrupt feeding the thought. Interrupt the actual movement. Without these interruptions the cycle will continue. The two phrases presented in the most recent notes served as my mental interrupters. They were my tools to interrupt some very pervasive thoughts.
Thought: “I’m stuck with this.” Interrupter: “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
Thought: “I’m overwhelmed with this.” Interrupter: “What is enough?”
A lightbulb went on when I realized that thinking could function in a similar way to tap dancing. Any practice, improvisational tap dance especially so, is a great reflection of this idea of interruption. Learn a skill (a way of thinking or doing) so that it becomes habit, but not so much so that it is beyond interruption, adjustment, and transformation. If the habit is too strong it will take over. If it is too weak its application when needed might fail.
As an improviser, I’ve found that much more work happens in the world of practice than the world of performance. This lead to an experience in which there was much more experimentation than assuredness for me. The position of always trying things out added an unhealthy level of “I don’t know for sure” to my world. I was living as if life was a rehearsal. I found myself oddly detached at times, and excessively immersed at others. The stress of the unsureness was compounding. This realization led me to my final turn.
There are some things in tap dance land that I am completely sure of. They aren’t just nice ideas. I have pressed my body into them, and lived them out. There needed to be things in my life that functioned in the same way. Things that I could be sure of, press my body into, and live out. These things became my answers to Dallas Willard’s Four Great Questions of Life. The process of finding my answers became my way of life. The work of my daily life has been testing and expressing these answers.
Repetitive stress can strategically and regularly eat away at a person’s being. There are potential repetitive stressors everywhere. In my journey, I’ve found that in prioritizing the work on my inner being – the foundation upon which my life is to stand – everything else would find its rightful place. While repetition continues, and practice abounds, the impact of past cycles and the stress of it all have been diminished considerably.