WIGGLE WIGGLE WIGGLE, YEAH

We started this exhibit with an invocation from Alan Watts. In it, he said: 

“It seems that the human being really has a very simple kind of mind, and all this wiggliness is too complicated. I don’t think it really is complicated because, after all, it’s very simple to move - say, to raise something, or to open and close your hand. It’s perfectly easy because we don’t have to think about it.”

An image that comes to mind is how someone would soften and bend when they woosh down a water slide. 

You enter the slide all tense and tight, straightening yourself out and preparing for what’s to come. But unless you’ve been on the slide before, there’s no way to know. Inevitably, if you surrender to it, the slide has its way with you as you slide around its curves. The way to have the best time is to scream WEEEE and fully give yourself to it.

There is a particular exhaustion that comes from a life organized around proving.

It is not the exhaustion of effort, exactly. You can work very hard doing something you love and not feel it. It is the exhaustion of the performance. Of maintaining the distance between who you actually are and who you're trying to appear to be. Of adjusting constantly, reading rooms, calculating what will make you credible, likeable, hireable, impressive.

You iron out your wiggle, and you don’t even notice it.

Instead of reading a longer essay on the merits of wiggling, what if you just got up and wiggled? What if just for today, you give in to taking yourself a little less seriously? 

What if, to quote the one and only LMFAO, you – 

“Do the wiggle, man, I do the wiggle, man. Yeah. I'm sexy, and I know it”

Did we start this exhibit by invoking Alan Watts and close it with LMFAO? Yes, because that is precisely what it means to wiggle – beyond expectation, beyond form, beyond genre. To see how everything is connected – to understand the beauty of the non-linear – to let it be silly and joyful – to try a little less hard – to embrace all our wonderfully weird and wiggly parts – and to move, freely, courageously – trusting that the entirety of the non-linear world is in your corner. 

Thanks for joining us for The Whole World Wiggles.