Sometimes you find a thought sloshing around the back of your mind in an intriguing but unfocused way for quite a while, when suddenly you come across something that brings it sharply into focus. I’ve had a couple of these recently, both sparked by the same stimulus.
Towards the end of last year I read Donald Weed’s What You Think is What You Get, in which he makes a distinction between axial and appendicular functions in the skeleton, and, consequently, between postural and gestural dimensions of bodily use. This is in itself a useful concept to have to hand when learning motor skills. It is very easy to put all our attention on the bits that are specific to the task in hand ( e.g. conducting, playing piano, chopping onions, to take examples from my own life), whereas the success of these specialist, gestural movements is to a significant extent dependent upon how well we are managing the general, postural use of the self.
