Hares keen to box with foxes

The basic idea behind PRI’s teachings is that human bodies are naturally asymmetrical, and this affects how we move and breathe. Although you are likely pretty symmetrical on the outside (two arms, two legs, two breasts, etc.), internally, your heart sits on your left side, and to make room for it, your left lung is slightly smaller than your right lung. Your main breathing muscle, the diaphragm, is actually two muscles, a stronger, larger right leaflet and a smaller, weaker left leaflet. “Because of this, the left and the right side are not doing the same thing,” says Jennifer Platt, DPT, executive director of the Postural Restoration Institute. [...]

Problems begin when stress and repetitive activities in our lives accentuate this natural imbalance. “Walking, riding the bike, or sitting at the computer, doing any of these repetitive activities, you become very lateralized. You become one-side dominant,” Platt says. And that can wreak havoc on your neck, shoulders, back, and joints. 

https://elemental.medium.com/everything-you-know-about-good-posture-is-wrong-cca9b941b651

...

Kropotkin’s actual argument is far more interesting. Much of it, for instance, is concerned with how animal cooperation often has nothing to do with survival or reproduction, but is a form of pleasure in itself. “To take flight in flocks merely for pleasure is quite common among all sorts of birds,” he writes. Kropotkin multiplies examples of social play: pairs of vultures wheeling about for their own entertainment, hares so keen to box with other species that they occasionally (and unwisely) approach foxes, flocks of birds performing military-style maneuvers, bands of squirrels coming together for wrestling and similar games: [...]

To exercise one’s capacities to their fullest extent is to take pleasure in one’s own existence, and with sociable creatures, such pleasures are proportionally magnified when performed in company. From the Russian perspective, this does not need to be explained. It is simply what life is. We don’t have to explain why creatures desire to be alive. Life is an end in itself. And if what being alive actually consists of is having powers—to run, jump, fight, fly through the air—then surely the exercise of such powers as an end in itself does not have to be explained either. It’s just an extension of the same principle.

Friedrich Schiller had already argued in 1795 that it was precisely in play that we find the origins of self-consciousness, and hence freedom, and hence morality. 

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun?fbclid=IwAR3heJ8pRmvbr-_F2FrHAIAg6uZCAT5NnxEBC4p8cqIChIZYVnspd9cHgwg