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E-book Sweet Spots : Writing the Connective Tissue of Relation

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Penilaian

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My dad had high hopes for me to become a profession-al golfer. In my early teens, I could out-drive his golfing buddies, who would gape at my easy swing and hand–eye–body precision. This would pump up my father’s de-termination to groom my natural ability. He entered me in summer tournaments throughout the Pacific North-west. But I lacked the cutthroat drive necessary to win sudden-death playoffs. What I enjoyed was nailing the sweet spot of the golf ball: the clean crack that sent the ball soaring high and long, and carried with it the effort-less feeling that the ball and I were inseparable. The technical term for “sweet spot,” according to the sci-ence of physics, is “the center of percussion.” However, the impact point that feels best is usually the node of the fundamental vibration mode, not the center of percus-sion.1That is, the sweetest sweet spot is in the vibration, just off center. Early on in acupuncture school – the late 1980s in Boston – one of my teachers paused during his lecture and made an offhand comment. Looking back, it was a timely com-ment that seeded a radical shift in the way that I perceive the world, and how I orient to experience. He said, as a casual aside: “You know, acupuncture is all about the multiplicity of phenomena occurring simultane-ously.” He then relocated his place in his lecture notes, and turned to the blackboard. As I rushed to scribble down the pithy sentence, the ontological ground beneath me began to quake: to think like an acupuncturist means I need to learn to place my-self within the multiplicity of phenomena occurring simulta-neously. As I began to digest the sentence, and consider the complexity of its implication, I got my first semicon-scious glimpse of pluralism. A major trajectory shift was in motion. I could never fully return to the comfortable habits of binary thinking: this or that. From now on, I realized, I’ll attempt to make pluralism my ontological operative and try to place it at the nexus of my everyday experience. To do so, I’ll need to learn how to keep one perceptual foot grounded in the plurals, in the multiplic-ity of the fluxes. And somehow learn to move, with puny acupuncture needles, this elusive stuff called qi – consid-ered to be both energy and matter at once – which travels amidst the multiplicities. In that pivotal moment, the teacher’s comment spoke to a long-standing intuition: that it is impossible to step into the same place in a river twice. Change is constant. Nothing is certain, and there are certainly no Experts, except maybe the body in its immediate experience. The comment also supported my ongoing sense of the human body as unfathomably complex: all the thousands of sys-tems, trillions of cells, busy going about their businesses, whether we know it or not.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

189 SEM s

Penerbit

London : Punctum books., 2021

Deskripsi Fisik

265 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781685710118

Klasifikasi

189

Tipe Isi

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Tipe Media

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Tipe Pembawa

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Edisi

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Subjek

Medieval Western Philosophy

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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