“This world is a great wiggly affair. Clouds are wiggly, waters are wiggly, plants are wiggly, mountains are wiggly, people are wiggly. But people are always trying to straighten things out.”
Alan Watts
To define wiggliness is a losing battle. How can you possibly capture something so free?
Still, we can try to approximate its meaning.
We can say that to wiggle is to see life as a circle …
… rather than a straight line.
Or, more to the point, it’s to see life as a squiggle — a line that twists and turns, and goes up and down, and whose form isn’t recognisable until the whole picture is complete.
But it isn’t randomness. No, wiggliness doesn’t subscribe to the view — the scientific view, the nihilistic view — that we’re just particles randomly colliding into each other in a meaningless universe.
There’s still beauty and love in wiggliness.
After all, wiggliness is lying in the backyard and gazing up at the stars.
It’s calling up a long-lost friend just to say hello.
It’s playing a piece of music because it touches your soul.
It’s looking — I mean really, truly looking — at the bark of a scribbly gum.
But it’s not really about any particular action …
… or inaction …
… or job or occupation.
You could be a wiggly scientist or a wiggly zookeeper …
… a wiggly truck driver or a wiggly street sweeper.
In fact, in my experience, street sweepers are very wiggly people!
Wiggliness is all the dimensions of time swept up into one infinitely small ball of dust.
It’s dreaming, while awake.
And sleeping in, too.
It’s buying a kaleidoscope at a garage sale.
And watching a documentary about caribou.
It’s adjusting your plan — for your day, for your year, for your life, for the world.
But it doesn’t mean saying yes to everything.
Sometimes wiggliness means saying no, too.
It’s letting new thoughts form new channels in your mind.
And seeing that people are perfect in their imperfection.
It’s whistling your way down a crowded street.
And hopping on the first train that departs.
It’s judging the book you take with you by its back cover.
Of course, it’s harder to be wiggly with a rigid sense of self.
But selves are a little less fixed than we think, anyway.
So it’s about adapting to the contours of the day.
And going with the flow of life.
You know that feeling of vitality and wonder that you get from time to time — as you’re biking around the lake at sunset, or sharing a hot caramel sundae with a friend, or sitting quietly in a cabin in the middle of a forest — that moment where you say to yourself, “it’s a miracle that I’m here, and you’re there, and we’re all here together on this beautiful planet somewhere in the middle of an ever-expanding universe?”
That’s it.
Soulful Thoughts 