The measures with which the Authorities are trying to slow down and limit the infections have, among other closings, also made it impossible to access Dojos and gyms.
This restriction does not only affect people’s physical condition and their technical preparation but also deprives them of one of the fundamental reasons for attending a practice and training environment: the shower.
The shower in the locker room of the Dojo has highly evocative power. Kind of magnetism.
Raise the hand the one of you who, at least for once, hasn’t ever been attracted more by the chance of enjoying the shower as a last action before returning home?
It is in the shower that we enjoy a moment of authentic relax, perhaps (also) because we allow ourselves the luxury of regressing to the adolescent phase by giving our best (?) with our friends. Laughs, warm water that relaxes the muscles, the scent of soap, the pleasure of sharing.
Staying at home means having to rediscover and redefine spaces. It is not always easy and not always because of the limited surface area available. Forced coexistence, with oursleves or with others, raises issues of acceptance, self-discovery, of relationship with others, of limits.
Staying at home means necessarily rediscovering your own shower or bathtub, which before was little more than an elegant piece of furniture used very seldom. Forgotten for excessive betrayal with other showers (at the Dojo).
Rediscovering this space, in the time dedicated to washing, can be used to rethink what Didier Anzieu, a famous French psychoanalyst wrote in his essay Moi-peau, Me-skin.
The skin on which water flows in the shower is the border between the me-body and the not-me. It marks a furrow that makes us able to perceive us as individuals through the awareness of our body.
This awareness varies over time: the spatiality of a child is not that of a teenager, nor that of an adult.
The relationship with space grows with increasing awareness. And it is this feature that allows each of us to be able to feel physically distant people and environments close, even if not in a tangible way.
The awareness, well educated and addressed, can go beyond the limits of space and time and helps us to remap and redefine spaces in times of “staying at home”, without turning us as depressed people who cling to strange fantasies.
How many things can teach the shower at home…
Let’s use this time to live a new romantic season with our shower, with our spaces rediscovered in our homes. Our appearance, our health will benefit of that and we will also be able to vivify, with a little more awareness, also our relationships.