Sitting Is a Skill
(A skill we don’t want to acquire)
A skill is something that we acquire and develop through practice. A skill could be as simple as a single move, or as complex as a combination of various physical actions carried out to produce a coherent, expected result. Sitting is also a skill.
We take our ability to sit for granted, perhaps, because we learn to sit before we become fully self-aware. In other words, most of us have been able to sit for as long as we can remember. For the parents of a toddler who just learned to sit on his own, however, it’s a much-celebrated achievement.
Certain neuromuscular associations must be established in order to coordinate the muscle work for this seemingly simple action. We need to stabilize our pelvis using muscles in our legs and hips. Then, we dynamically stabilize each vertebra and use the muscles of the torso for bracing. We involve our neck and the muscles of the shoulder girdle. Actually, it requires the coordination of tens of different muscles to achieve a stable sitting position, but we rarely think about that because our body, somehow, does it for us.
Actually, as we practice any new skill – consciously or subconsciously – we deal with the “black box” of our body, or, more technically, of our mind. We don’t know or care to know what’s going on inside of this black box. We just keep on repeating an action. When we are happy with the result, we reinforce it with a positive emotion, which gets recorded by our brain. The more you repeat this and get it right, the more the skill becomes embedded in you. As a matter of fact, your brain works in the background to optimize various internal processes to make it easier for you to perform the skill you practice.
If you start thinking about all of our skills, abilities we somehow acquired through trials and repetitions, then you will realize that we are pretty skillful people. We can walk, we can talk, we can smile. All of these are skills – though, maybe not the kind of skills you’d include on your professional resume.
Being able to characterize something as a skill turns out to be pretty handy. For example, we know that a skill can be improved. If sitting is a skill, then we can improve it. Have you ever thought about it that way? Probably not! A skill can also be lost. Try doing something that you haven’t done in a while. How clumsy do you feel? That means you’ve somewhat lost that skill.
Right about now, one may ask: “Is it not a good thing that we have all these skills? The more skills we have, the better, right? Why would we want to forget a skill? We definitely wouldn’t want to forget how to sit! Or would we?”
Great questions! You will get your answers now. For that, we’ll need to bring back something that we discussed a bit earlier. Let me remind you, we are not talking about just any kind of sitting. We are talking about prolonged sitting.