Where is your body in space?

Greetings cherubs!

Winter in Boston brings a curious juxtaposition of order and chaos to Boston's buildings and streets. Ice creates the chaos. People are slipping, sliding, walking like creatures more akin to ducks or penguins than human beings. They take up much more space -- arms outstretched for balance and looking fearfully from side to side to make sure that nobody, absolutely nobody can touch them or are coming close to touching them or even thinking about touching them lest they lose their balance. The line weaves around from South Station working carefully around particularly frozen bits, or going way out of its way to avoid the worst of all the worsts -- the polished stone that looks so nice on the entrance to buildings in summer but creates a horror show when freezing rain, or sleet or ice covers it.The news programs show endless taped loops of people falling on their behinds. I was watching a popular local news program one morning and I think I saw the same guy fall on his ass at least 25 times in the space of 15 minutes. I mean jeepers, don't you feel sorry for that poor guy? "Hey George, what did you do this morning?" "I watched myself on TV falling on my ass 25 times." What a way to start the day. When it's icy, you have little control over where your body is in space.

Now the snow, the snow creates order. In what must be an effort to conserve precious budget dollars, there is only one path shoveled from South Station, to Surface Road, and then from the Red Line kiosk, across Dewey Square to that absurd intersection that I have written about before where two roads converge coming out of the tunnel. Once you survive crossing these two roads, there is again only one path across the courtyard of 175 Federal Street to High Street.What this does is force people to walk in an orderly fashion using these paths. Everybody has no choice -- we have to touch one another because there's too many of us to get by each other without touching and we have to harden our hearts against the homeless folks selling Spare Change newspapers and holding out cups since they, too, must use the same path. I can even hear the poor Spare Change Newspaper guy grumble under his breath every time one of us hard hearted creatures passes him by without so much as a glance. But everybody knows where his or her body is in space.

When the snow melts and the ice is gone, then nobody has any idea where their body is in space. South Station is a cavernous building with no clearly delineated paths of traffic. There is a hap hazard scattering of tables and chairs, the ubiquitous coffee bars and newsstands placed here and there with seemingly no planning whatsoever. The people flow off the trains, into the station and guess what's coming at them? You guessed it, people flowing off the subway coming up the escalator in the opposite direction. What brilliant engineer came up with that one? So imagine now if you will my friends, the scene. We have two mobs of people dashing toward one another with briefcases, backpacks, cell phones, Ipods, and yes, they all have their heads down. It's a blood bath! It's a den of thieves! It's a free for all! As soon as you get to the escalators, you have to dodge the people crossing your path. Eventually, they will turn around and be going in the same direction as you are but even that is a struggle as we attempt to all ummmmm "get the right of way".Once out of the building if there's no weather to organize us, we wander about as if we were in our right minds. I have already written about paying no attention to the lights, but one thing really strikes me, and that is that so many people are wearing headphones or ear buds, they most likely can't hear you or anything else but what's pounding in their ears. Their heads are down because it's a weekday morning and they're probably caffeine deprived so their sensory skills are already muted. In other words, they don't just only not know where their bodies are in space, they have no access to the space at all. They're closed off, entities unto themselves and they bring their own space to the space, as if the shared space didn't matter at all.

Where is your body in space is the question I used to ask my daughter when she used to bump into me, or her dad, or a chair, or other obstruction. Daughter, I used to say, one must be aware of where one's body is in space. I guess it always came easily to me since I was a dancer so it was part of my job to have that awareness. But I think that awareness may be diminishing in our workaday world and I'm not sure whether I'm sad about that or whether I just accept it as part of the constant rabble of change that bangs on my head relentlessly every single day. I wish everybody a happy day and for heaven's sake, be aware of where your body is in space!

Warmly and with love, Margaret