Learning to fall

The art of surrender

This week, I have been watching, over and over again, that grandest of human quests – when a human surrenders to the physics of the world, and against everything that their cells are screaming, allow for the inevitability of gravity. Tethered to the ground as we are, we must face the great impasse of our own limitations and the incongruity, that is, of the flightless bird.

When I dream of flying, I start from standing and pump my arms up and down until I start to lift off the ground. I must continue to pump to keep moving skyward, although it gets easier the higher I go. I do not soar. I don’t travel forward or backward – just up and down. But I can get to great heights this way. And when I wake up, I think it’s almost conceivable that I might be able to fly like this. The effort it takes seems reasonable for the act, it feels that it would take this kind of physical work to slowly find my way heading toward the sky.

I am in this dream often, and can fly no other way.

We all dream of flying. Don’t we? How strange it is that we dream of the one physical feat, none of us have ever achieved. What latent DNA thread do we share that makes us believe that maybe, just maybe, we can. Or is it that we are descendants of an ancient flock that had the capacity to head heaven bound and if we remember who we were, then we might?

Whatever drives this inside us, this yearning to lift off, also knows who we are now. We are not with wings, even though we may long for them. Instead, we are chained to the earth, only capable to jump as high as Christopher Spell from Shell Oak, New York, who has the record of 1.7 metres from a standing start.

But this week, I have seen the moment, over and over again. The moment when we learn we have to be brave enough, not to fly, but to fall.

There is a rock, on top of a cave, by an inlet, on an island in Greece that my partner would jump from as a child. I say jump, but really, the hope of the child is that it’s a jump when instead, we learn as we grow up, it’s in fact a fall. The jump we make only constitutes an eighth of the whole shebang. The rest of it is in surrender, as we spend most of it falling, drawn decisively back to the water below, by forces that exist to thwart us from flight. And while our action might be to jump, the greater action is of our surrender. Gravity will always have its way with us. There is no exit upwards.

There are degrees and heights and different measures of danger in the jump from that rock. He tells me, that as a child, he would jump from the top, it’s maybe 12 metres from the water below. But now, he watches on, wishing he was still the child who now climbs as he once did. He knows his body won’t handle the harshness of reentry. The water doesn’t forgive, instead it is there to scold as it slaps your body hard when you come back to her, ‘Foolish child’

But this is the challenge we all face - how far are you prepared to fall? How far are you prepared to climb? What terror are you prepared to endure for those moments as you stand there, metres into the air, where you know you don’t belong? And then fall anticipate how it will end.

I spent days watching as children climbed the rock. Each with their own measure of danger, many over-estimating what the choice to fall would feel like and climbing higher than their bravery seemed capable of facing. But while many stood there, atop the world, waiting for what seemed like an age, the choice not to fall seemed even harder to make. Now that they had found themselves there, the only easy way back down, was to give way, and let gravity do her thing.

What great faith it takes to surrender. But faith in what? My bravery got me to a two metre station on the rock, not high, but applauded by those below who knew I had faced my limit. But what of it? What do we gain when we ask ourselves to take that leap and then surrender to it? Is it in the landing? Or in the climbing? Or in that leap? Or, is it more, in all of the ‘not doing’. Those precious moments when we remember, not that we once flew, but that also, somewhere in our DNA, we know how to fall.

We remember to fall, and to climb that rock over and over again to remind us that we must be brave enough to let go.