The Beginning

I was sitting in the Purple Lantern cafe when I saw a young man walking on the opposite side of the street. From the way that he moved I knew that he was aware of a certain knowledge that I needed to know.

“He knows what I am looking for.” I said to myself. “Whatever he knows is what I want to know.”

There is a lot revealed in the way a person walks: confidence; shame; machismo; fear; happiness; innocence. Those are obvious qualities that show up in our gait, which are plainly obvious to most of us, but if you look closer you can see even more in the subtle movements that make up the meanings behind of our walking language.

There are books that explain the science of body language, but in order to truly understand the communication system you need to treat it like any other language, not from a textbook analysis, but from personal experience learning.

Imagine, while you are people watching, that we have no spoken language and that our means of communication is through the way we walk. You notice that no two people are the same, yet everyone uses the same words and phrases of movement. What do you see and hear?

It’s not pseudo-science, nor is it psychic phenomena, nor do you need to be highly trained to understand its complexities. It only requires careful observation and a willingness to learn as you go, much like we learn our native tongue.

I don’t remember the exact time that I began to learn to read people’s walk, but I do know that it had something to do with understanding other’s through their subtle, natural expressions rather than the somewhat contrived speech of cultural dialogue.

In such dialogue we are often bound to the rules of expression that permeate the social class we occupy at any given point. Every class, every profession, every group has its own jargon.

But beneath the external verbal limitations and differences, we speak a common language which none of us can avoid. We learn that language even before we learn to speak and we speak it, without conscious effort (usually) with far greater efficiency than any other form of expression.

In fact there are two ‘languages’ we learn before speech. One is movement and the other is sound.