Transversal thinking

Transversal thinking 

(or how to plant a tree in a gym)

I've just finished Ways of Being by James Bridle. A book that isn’t really about us— and that’s precisely why it speaks about us better than we ever could. He invites us to redefine our perception of learning and culture. What speaks to me about his thinking is his ability to challenge supposedly immutable systems, while offering us a fresh perspective. It's about the non-human world: that which lives, acts, reacts and thinks without a selfie or PowerPoint. In other words, everything that still has a shred of dignity. And even more, the way this world interacts with us - or rather, intra-acts, as Karen Barad would say. For we are neither alone, nor masters, nor independent. And above all, we're not as separate from the rest of life as we like to think. We're just the most talkative part of the system.

When I read Bridle, I couldn't help but make the connection with physical training. Yes, that strange ritual we think of as strictly human, timed, individualized, hygienized, ready to be sold in tubs under the cellophane of ready-to-eat, ingest, digest, toilet down the hall. But what if we changed the angle? What if we considered that our training should be more like an exchange between a tree and a mushroom than yet another battle against ourselves? What if the intelligence required for our transformation wasn't in control, but in collaboration - even co-emergence?

Collaboration, then. Not the soft, polite, consensual alliance between a two-hour Powerpoint and a brain in post-pandrial mode. Not interaction, but intra-action - the process of a phenomenon or body in the making. Like the atom that constitutes us, which is not a fixed, inviolate entity, but a state of possibilities. A visceral, invisible, instinctive collaboration, like that between the roots of a beech tree and the mycelia that surround it. Or the even more disturbing collaboration between our own genome and the forgotten viruses that have remodeled it. We are assemblages. Chimeras. Mobile colonies. Hybridizations. Less individuals than symbioses, and as Bridle rightly puts it, "opposed to the violent, competitive account of the emergence of life given by Darwinian evolution."  This vision of a top-down hierarchy is clearly being called into question today, and we can see the damage being done in offices and gyms: same language, same neon lights.

So why continue to believe that our training should follow a straight line? Why aim for an "after" when we don't know what the "before" is made of, and not much more about the "during, here and now"? Why ignore the omnipresent reality of everything that revolves around it: our failures, our connections, our desires, our renunciations, our contexts, our communities, even our intestinal bacteria?

By the way, as soon as I close the book, I come across a personal trainer website. Beautiful site. Premium sobriety, muffled beige, no rough edges, furnished with contemporary emptiness: seriousness has a graphic charter. The coach appears in a white shirt, watch visible - nothing says "competence" like sleeves rolled up to the right crease and the accessory of an entrepreneur always on time, never a grouch.  A smile filled with beautiful white teeth defines the knowledge distributor. He's the avatar of a messaging app: half ideal son-in-law, half boyfriend, zero entropy.  As I browse the site, the inevitable before-and-after photos fall into my lap. On the left: Mr. Office Automation, paunchy but confident, shirtless in a room with harsh lighting. Right: same guy, same room, same pose, but with abs. Victory! Transformation! Epiphany! The body has spoken, the program has worked, the coach too - but on the water. 

But what I see most of all is what we don't show. The invisible. The intra-visible, even. What was around, before, during. The environment. The companion sharing the bathroom. The children. Colleagues. The stress. Doubts. Chip cravings. What was the impact of all these exogenous elements on training and the program? What conscious and unconscious influences (we could say collaboration instead of influences) had he benefited from? How many inputs had been considered, included or ignored? 

The result is there, yes. But for how long? At what cost? And above all: for whom? For whom?

As with the famous tramway problem, the focus is on the last decision, at the last bifurcation on the Y. But by focusing on the method and the result, haven't we overlooked everything else that is just as important, if not more so, in terms of viability, sustainability and integration into a world of symbiotic cooperation? The emotional urbanism surrounding life, for example? Inherited fatigue, mute traumas, upbringing, feeding, crossed eyes, the Instagram algorithm that sells you muscular injunctions between two puppy stories? 

That's what transversal thinking is all about. It means refusing to look at the result as an end. It means looking at interactions, shifts and processes. It means realizing that the body is a place of emergence, not a project to be optimized.

So how do you train? How to train?

Maybe stop thinking we're dragging something along. Maybe by letting yourself go through it. By doubt, pleasure, clumsiness, risk. 

Because deep down, I don't believe in shouted efforts, musical montages with motivational cries and exaggerated positivism. I believe in exploration, in surprise. In failure as a founding moment. I believe that if you lose yourself in your body for a while, you've already begun to inhabit it.

And above all: I don't believe in programs as a vector for change.  I'm not saying that there are no results - in the end, everything works and nothing works - but how many people have I seen training and achieving visible results, but who have never known how to stop, and who are constantly pushing back the goal in a selfish and pointless movement that has no intrinsic existence? They need to eliminate the random, the unknown, the collaborative, uncontrolled part of themselves, which would nevertheless enable positive evolution in the sense that it would occur by mimicry with nature within us.  

I believe in stories. In shifts. In hazards. In forks in the road. I believe that training is a conversation with what we don't yet understand.

So there you have it. Maybe real coaching isn't about showing the way. It's about helping you see that you're already there. Learning to listen to your body - not its performance, not its "results", but its sighs, its refusals, its strange joys.

A good coach (if there is such a thing) doesn't help you become someone. It helps you stop believing you're not already someone.

Digital tools, including the coaching website you're reading this on, offer us the possibility of interacting with our bodies in ways that go beyond the simple limits of calculation. This site doesn't simply apply a single method; it adapts, invites you to try, to create. It's a space where we can experience freedom in training, a space where we accept that we don't have all the answers, but where every movement becomes a search, an exploration.

In this world that seems so structured, perhaps it's time to remember that the essence of our existence, like the essence of training, lies not in the application of rigid rules, but in our ability to explore, to make mistakes, to try again, and above all, to have fun.

What if we trained ourselves not to change, but to better inhabit who we are? To dance with what we're running away from? To scare ourselves a little, to not take ourselves so seriously, seriously. And what if training, in the end, was just about learning to fall more gracefully?

I'm proposing that we train not as humans, but as natural beings, full of uncertainty and unsuspected potential. Without dogma. Never knowing anything, always discovering and letting everything happen by chance. To exclude nothing. 

B.R.