The Luckiest Man Alive?

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The civil rights movement, he notes, grew out of this deep spirit in black churches. “The people dancing in the aisles on Sunday were the same ones marching in the streets and doing freedom rides.” Keeney believes we can call on this spirit to aid in today’s struggles, not just campaigns fighting political oppression, but also opposition to the mounting soullessness of modern society. In his view, the same forces that dispossess indigenous and poor people also lay waste to the environment and want to impose solemnity, standardization, and dullness upon our lives.

One morning over a breakfast of huevos rancheros doused in hot sauce, he rattles off a personal list of what this means in concrete terms:

• Too much testing of kids in school.
• Not enough recess.
• Disappearing street life.
• The triumph of humorlessness in politics.
• Windows that don’t open.
• No more sleaze in Times Square.
• Less jazz on Bourbon Street.

Mapping out his strategy for resistance, inspired by all he’s learned in vital and remote corners of human culture, Keeney urges us to get moving—literally. Walk. Dance. Sway. Strut down the street. Tap your fingers on your desk. Play air guitar (or, in his case, air keyboards). Pretend you’re a symphony conductor. Rediscover rocking chairs and porch swings. Find your own rhythm, and then put a little swing into everything you do.

Don’t worry about looking foolish, he counsels, just shimmy and shake any way that feels natural. “You shouldn’t have to go to a movement class to just be able to move. We need to free our bodies.

“With the exception of two disastrous proms, the first time I ever danced was with the Bushmen. I learned that to shake and move wildly feels damn good. You experience being alive in new ways. I get up and shake my way around the room all the time now. It changed my life. If I can do it, you can.”

The next front in this revolution against soullessness, according to Keeney, is to overthrow our obsession with always being in charge. The Bushman people, he notes, control very little of what happens in their lives yet often experience a sense of exhilaration that many Westerners need expensive drugs to reach.

“Whatever happened to just winging it?” he asks. “Our culture more and more cultivates the measurable, the predictable, the standardized. We have become too caught up in trying to understand and diagnose everything. That’s absurd. Do you learn to swim by reading the stories of great swimmers and studying the kinesiology of the backstroke? No, you get in the water and see what works.”

Keeney admits that it sounds radical, even outlandish, to suggest that people should willingly give up some control over their lives, but he adds that for him it has made all the difference. “I didn’t have dreams that took me places until I sat scared and confused on that cliff during my vision quest,” he remarks. “That’s the moment when I learned how to give up controlling everything. Since then marvelous things have happened.”

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