When I was a small child I remember one summer visiting
cousins and learning how to dive.
I stood in the hot sun with my toes curled on the lip of the pool,
crouched and ready, hands held at my chest in a position of prayer shaping the
head of the arrow I would become when I finally got the courage to spring
into the water. And like an arrow
that is already lodged in its target, I couldn’t back up or step off.
Days went by and I held my position. They called me to lunch, made me wait
an hour, told me to come home for dinner.
I slept. Then I went back
the next day, and the next. The
tension would build, bring me to the brink of accomplishment, and my body would
thrill with adrenaline as I thought, “Now! I’m going to do it now!” But at the last second all that
forward momentum was met by a brutal wall of fear, forces colliding in
midstream, and I remained frozen in place. I was helpless to move forward or back.
Then one day I did it.
Pushed off from the edge of the pool, knifed my body into the water and
emerged victorious, screaming, “Did you see?” But no one had.
These triumphs are often private because anyone who might have cared
gave up days (or months or years) ago, sick of watching someone who appeared to
have turned to stone. But I made
them watch as I repeated it again, and again, and again. Thousands of dives into the water
completing each and every aborted action that had built up in my nervous system
during my endless hours of readiness.
It’s helpful for me to remember this because there are parts
of me that don’t move, unable to go forward or back. Some of these parts have been poised and ready for
generations, others for a day or so.
I have spent much of my life judging these places as failure, staring at
the Medusa in the mirror and turning to stone, ignoring the aliveness in
waiting for the right moment for conception to take place, for the arrow to
pierce the veil.
In my lineage there is endless betrayal and sadness, trust
broken time and again. Lately I
am thinking of it all differently.
What I am struck by is the part of me that never leaves the side of the
pool, that is willing to stand there disappointing myself over and over and
over, all the while storing energy for that moment of personal best,
most likely witnessed by no one, when I will finally break free.
