Keep Moving!

Today I went to a reading and talk by Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most acclaimed contemporary writers in Poland. (And rightly so!) She was promoting and talking about her new book, “Bieguni” or “Beguns/Wanderers”. The name refers to a minor group of the “Old Believers” — Russian Christians who broke off from the Russian Orthodox church in the fifteenth century, believing that the devil had captured the world and that the only way to escape from his power was to keep moving. The only way that they can sleep these days is on public transport; apparently they can be spotted sleeping in the Moscow metro. An audience member suggested that it was in fact the other way around, that the Platonic ideal of perfection is static, while Heraclites’ concept of eternal flux is more like the work of the devil.

If you imagine or experience a kind of static ordering force which categorises and controls the world, I don’t think it matters if you call it God or the Devil — it seems to me that movement will always be on the side of humanity, life, the side of reality. The side of subversion, too. After all, reality always escapes order and control. It made me think, in terms of therapy, too, about static self concepts and about the flow which can be said to characterise a sense of growth, wholeness, or healing.

We can call our self structure God or the Devil — we can think we are superior or inferior. Whatever we are, if we are stuck like that, controlled by a fixed idea of ourselves, interpreting everything around us to support it, we are going to feel discomfort on some level. Because our experience isn’t like that. It is in eternal flux, constant movement.

Luckily, although travelling provides a wonderful metaphor for the book, we don’t actually have to spend nights on the underground in order to keep moving and escape the clutches of that which would impose an absolute order on us. All we have to do is listen to what is going on beneath our noisy beliefs about ourselves and the world. Movement is our natural state.

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