Simple Sunday VI

[Barrett Dorko]

Each Sunday for ten weeks I want to briefly examine one of John Maeda’s Ten Laws of Simplicity.

Unless otherwise designated, the quotes will be from this book. Some are considerably paraphrased, but the book led me to them.

Using simplicity to enhance understanding of complex processes has been beneficial elsewhere but I don’t think it has been used specifically for manual care before. In fact, we’ve usually moved in the other direction. As has been said, “Complex does not equal complicated” and if simplicity lies at the far side of complexity (not my original idea either) studying the deep model of the nervous system remains essential to our method. This, however, is a task that never ends.

In the meantime, some conclusions about the nature, power and effect of simplification can be drawn. They come from Maeda.

Law Six: What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.

“Focus,” though imbued with positive connotations, is not always precisely what you want. Become a light bulb instead of a laser beam and you will enlighten everything around you. Find the meaning of everything around and not just those things you face directly. Our goal is to achieve a kind of enlightened shallowness – and we start this trek by talking about nothing.

You can appreciate how much I liked this if you read this and this.

Blank surfaces invite chaos.

In Negative Space:

“I use negative space,” she said. “People like to fill the emptiness between the flowers with their own imagination, and I let them do that. It sounds easy I guess, but it took some time for me to do that well.”

I sometimes refer to what I do as “minimalist physical therapy” because the method I employ is so spare and noncoercive. I make sure that the therapeutic environment includes time, opportunity and safe, adequate space for the personal and unique expression of movement that I feel is essential for pain relief… Understanding that we are complex and often unpredictable creatures has always been a tenet of therapeutic practice. A concept such as holism is not needed for those of us who already know this.

Read this where you’ll find (paraphrased):

I don't focus on where to push or prod my patients. I get out of their way and they fill that space with a movement that only they know how to create. It seems random and unpredictable, chaotic even. It’s supposed to be. What I do is easy, what emerges is unpredictable in terms of range and direction, but the characteristics of correction mark it as appropriate. Unless I simplify my half of the interaction I will get in the way, but this doesn’t mean I ignore the complexity of the process that precedes the movement.

Now, from Maeda:

A designer would choose to do their best to preserve the emptiness because of their perspective that nothing is an important something. Blank spaces draw our attention toward what is still present; when there is less we appreciate everything much more.

I imagine demonstrating Simple Contact without speaking to the class. This would certainly not be enough for most, but for a few with a true understanding of neuroscience and pain it would. I imagine their seeing that the application of method is congruent with the facts about the brain as currently understood.

The therapy community isn’t there yet.

Complexity implies the feeling of being lost; simplicity implies the feeling of being found.

For me, this is precisely true.

[ahboncainri]

It is difficult to understand how the therapy community isn’t there yet.
One does not have to believe in minimalist physical therapy as a philosophy but only to look at well designed studies and reviews. So much of what I have been taught in physical therapy school, continuing education classed, and residency program is showing poor reliability, validity, efficacy, and so on.
I believe that minimalist physical therapy is not a choice but is all we have if we want to stand on scientific ground.

[Barrett Dorko]

Thank you for this

While commerce pushes us in one direction science pushes in another.

The word untenable comes to mind.