Take a walk in a different body - try these activities

1.Walk up a hill carrying a heavy backpack full of books. Now ditch the weight and imagine you’re a super fit athlete running up the hill. How different are those two experiences of the same place? What do you notice about your body? About the surrounding world? What’s going on inside our bodies affects how we see the outside world.

2.Try walking on your knees around the house as if you were a small child – how different does a familiar environment look? Can you remember being that size? How about if you were 7ft tall? Carry a box around the house and stand on it to see how a very tall person experiences the same room. What can they see and touch that others can’t?

3.Wrap a bandage around a part of your body and pretend it hurts. Walk around with your bandage on being super aware of that part of your body as if it was vulnerable. Make up stories of what’s the matter with it and describe the pain. How does having a damaged part of your body make you move and think? I once had to wear a neck brace to school and it made me move with a very straight back and everyone said how tall and elegant I looked.

Commit to these imaginative acts and write down what you discover – how different is the world to people in different bodies? Does it make you have more awareness of differently abled people? You could explore a familiar environment in a blindfold or with ear plugs in. How does limiting one of your senses make you more aware of the others? Try to move across your bedroom without using your feet? We might look at a person in a wheelchair and think of them as passive but imagine the upper body strength they’ll develop lifting themselves in and out of their chair.

Examples of characters where their bodies are used in distinctive ways - JK Rowling writing crime novels as Robert Galbraith, has a detective Cormoran Strike, with an amputated leg and his investigations are often disrupted by the fact that he can’t chase after a criminal or that his stump hurts if he does too much walking.

In the Henry James novel ‘What Maisie Knew’ the narrator is a very young child, and the world is described from her eye level so table tops are above her and people are first seen at knee height.