First Moves

First moves in a situation are often missed in the daily milieu, they are rarely formally announced as in a game of chess, rather they echo into the future sounding loud or soft depending on what they have to say. Their significance permeates our actions determining how we respond, how we experience ourselves and our actions. First moves are the set up for what might follow and arise themselves out of our understanding, our own anticipation of a situation and the possibilities or impossibilities that it holds for us. First moves rest, as in chess, not just on our formal understanding but on our tacit understanding of how things are. We start making them in the womb - we are a form of motion, alive. George Kelly used the idea that we are a form of motion to ground Personal Construct Psychology, while Alexander investigated his habitual patterns of movement to develop the Alexander Technique. Common to both is the recognition that people are not just alive, but making choices, choices which have implications, implications they are not often aware of in the way they move, turn, what they attend to, what they make sense of. Alexander developed a way of helping people become more aware of the implications of their own choices at a micro level of action, which highlights how thought is movement and how movement is thought. Kelly put it this way that ‘behaviour is an experiment’ whether you are shifting your weight to protect a sore foot or knee or whether you take up a new activity or whether you ask someone out for the first time. There is always a theory in the movement of asking, in the shifting of the weight whether it is fully articulated or not. It’s what there in the movement, the first move at the beginning and if we can learn to see it, we can change it and experiment with something else, whether its learning the Alexander Technique, taking up painting or seeing somebody else’s viewpoint for the first time. To see somebody else’s view point, to ‘stand in their shoes’, another Kelly quote, is the first step to building a better set of relationships, dialoguing with them and perhaps building a better world if not for all at least for ourselves. Perhaps ultimately this is the only first move worth exploring, seeing other people and learning to be with them.