The Body We Think With

A little surreal fun with AI, using a drawing my daughter made when she was about six.

When I was a graduate student studying product design, I once spent almost three days without sleep trying to finish a 3D model for a project.

I was young and healthy, and pulling all-nighters wasn’t all that unusual. I would sit in the computer room at school for hours, completely absorbed in whatever I was working on. I barely thought about what might be happening to my body—well, until the third day.

I went straight home from the computer room, took a quick shower, changed my clothes—I was sharing a house with friends just a few minutes’ walk from school at the time—and went right back for class.

I was sitting there listening to my professor when suddenly, I saw the top of his head slowly slide away from the rest of it.

ー Oh shit! My brain is losing it from lack of sleep.ー

The memory is still clear to this day.

That was finally enough to convince me to go home and get some proper sleep in an actual bed.

It’s funny to me now, but I think there is something in that experience that connects to a question I find really interesting today.

When we’re completely absorbed in something, it’s easy to feel as if the mind is the one doing all the important work, while the body is just…attached to it.

We notice the body when it gets hungry. Or tired. Or sick. Or when something starts hurting.

And sometimes, when we finally notice it, our reaction is almost, Ugh. That’s so inconvenient!

Because whatever the body is asking for means we have to stop doing the thing we’re so focused on and take care of it.

But is that really how we’re built?

This is something I’ve become particularly interested in through my work as an interpreter.

Interpreting requires a lot of knowledge.

Vocabulary, grammar, cultural context, specialized terminology, and an understanding of all the subtle ways meaning can change depending on linguistic and cultural context.

Years of studying, memorizing, listening, and practicing have built that foundation for me.

But when I’m actually interpreting, simply knowing all of that is nowhere near enough.

When I listen to someone, it requires more than simply listening to their words.

It’s almost like sinking deeper into what is happening in them, and going there with them—to understand what they’re really trying to communicate, hold what I’ve just heard in my memory, connect the dots, find the right words in another language, and speak them out loud.

And while I’m doing all of that, I also keep listening to what comes next.

There is almost no time to consciously think through any of it.

When it’s going well, somehow all these different parts of me work together.

Not just my knowledge, but my hearing, memory, attention, voice, breath, timing—and my ability to sense what’s moving inside the person who’s speaking and what’s happening in the room.

When I think about it that way, interpreting is a surprisingly physical job.

I notice this especially when I’m tired.

The knowledge in my head should be exactly the same as it was the day before, but I can’t access it in the same way. A word that would normally come to me naturally doesn’t.

Connecting one idea to another takes a little longer. It’s harder to stay right here, in this moment, while also keeping my attention wide enough to take in everything that’s happening.

Over the years, I’ve come to think that being well rested and connected to my body isn’t something I do for my “health” separately from my work.

In my professional work as an interpreter, it’s actually a key part of how I show up and what I’m capable of.

And I wonder if the same thing is true of all communication.

We can learn how to listen. We can understand empathy. We can read books about communication, be deeply moved by them, and think, Yes. Exactly. This makes so much sense.

We feel like we’re ready to “communicate well with others.”

And then we’re in an actual conversation, and someone says something that hits us right where it hurts.

Suddenly, accessing everything we thought we understood can become surprisingly difficult.

I find this gap between knowing something and being able to actually activate it and live it in the moment fascinating.

As an interpreter, as someone who works with communication, and as an amateur dancer and artist, I find myself coming back to this question again and again, in very different places.

Maybe learning something as a human being isn’t only about how well we understand it with our minds.

Maybe it also has something to do with how available that understanding is to us through our whole body—our emotions, senses, attention, and thinking all together.

I don’t have a neat conclusion about this yet.But it’s something I want to keep thinking about.

What does it take for something we “know” in our heads to become something we can actually live?

🌱

A question for you

Have you ever had a moment when you knew something in your head,

but couldn’t quite live it in the moment?

I’d love to hear what comes up for you. Feel free to message me!