Away We Stay: Suspension
They are flying.
All these children, adults, these humans. Yes, they are jumping on trampolines but it's unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a backyard. This is precise, technical, lofty, and breathtaking. Away they fly into the air and sometimes you can count to five before they are earthbound again. I'm concerned for their heads and the proximity of the rafters.
These beautiful bodies soar and fall and arise again. They are climbing walls with their feet only to land on their backs and repeat. In this particular move they hang suspended with a toe touching a vertical wall and nothing else to recommend them as human. There is such effortlessness and when they float it's not with arms and legs akimbo. There is no twitching and fidgeting and fear contracting their muscles. This is the (seemingly) easy trust in gravity. The pull of the moon is taken for granted while being appreciated in a very unusual way.
“I can hold the fear in one hand and the exhilaration in the other and they balance each other with grace.”
Even more than trusting the constancy of the solar system, is the trusting of their bodies - the confidence in connective tissue to move the way it has many times before. The recognition that it's best to just let loose(ish). It turns out the only way to fly again is to unfurl. The only way to let go is to leap in the air and do the one thing your brain is screaming at you not to do. To brush away the instinct to stay firmly planted.
Is that where the thrill comes from? Defying the mind's extremely practical suggestion? From - just this once - saying, nah. I’ve got this. And then letting the muscles take over and the springy surface spring you heavenward. To ascend and see the stairs and the steel girders and the other people shrink. To be thrown above where you ever thought your eyes might observe.
So easy. All it takes it to let go. Watching them, these masters of the air, I can feel it. Feel the suspense that means all is right at this very moment despite the world falling away from underneath me. But in this pocketful of seconds, I can exist in the free fall. I can hold the fear in one hand and the exhilaration in the other and they balance each other with grace.
This is what I see in their faces with opened mouths and glazed eyes. Then they step onto solid ground and there’s a grin of success or an aw-shucks of I didn’t quite make it. Either way, almost everyone exits with a smile during their first few slightly unsteady steps. It’s more jarring to see in the adults, as that kind of joy is unexpected and infrequent for anyone past adolescence. But their smiles mirror the children’s and after a few breaths they step back on again to somersault, flip, twist, or combine all three in patterns difficult to even observe without vertigo.
I cannot join them at the present moment in their acrobatics, and likely never will at that level. But I can take my fist and put it over my stomach and imagine just for a moment what it’s like to feel terrified and happy and in control and strong and capable all at once.
Inspired by events at Woodward Park City, Utah
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