Let go of the monkey bar

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” – Lao Tzu

Sometimes taking flight takes letting go.

Letting go takes faith.

Faith takes letting go.

It all requires wings.

And so it goes.

As Kierkegaard has said, “Without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk, the greater the faith.” Flying begins with a leap of faith. And with someone to catch you when you’re falling, perhaps?

At the end of each year, I ask myself two questions: 1) what do I want to create in this new year? and, perhaps even more importantly,  2) what do I want to let go of?

This year, I needed to let go of a project I had been holding onto, one that was lucrative but deflected my attention from my real work. I needed to really let go, not pretend to let go, or hold on to vestiges of it to keep me comfortable.

It was a letting go that sent me flying into that space between the monkey bars, the one where you’ve let go but haven’t reached the other bar yet, the letting go that has to happen before the next bar is in your hand. Just after leaping, a friend told me I reminded her of a trapeze artist, flinging myself out into the universe. Another sent me this excerpt from “Fear of Transformation” that also invokes the art of trapeze:

“Sometimes I feel that my life is a series of trapeze swings. I’m either hanging on to a trapeze bar swinging along or, for a few moments in my life, I’m hurtling across space in between trapeze bars.

“Most of the time, I spend my life hanging on for dear life to my trapeze- bar- of- the- moment. It carries me along a certain steady rate of swing and I have the feeling that I’m in control of my life. I know most of the right questions and even some of the right answers. But once in a while, as I’m merrily (or not so merrily) swinging along, I look ahead of me into the distance, and what do I see? I see another trapeze bar swinging toward me. It’s empty, and I know, in that place that knows, that this new trapeze bar has my name on it. It is my next step, my growth, my aliveness going to get me. In my heart-of-hearts I know that for me to grow, I must release my grip on the present, well known bar to move to the new one.

“Each time it happens to me, I hope (no, I pray) that I won’t have to grab the new one. But in my knowing place I know that I must totally release my grasp on my old bar, and for some moment in time hurtle across space before I can grab onto the new bar. Each time I am filled with terror. It doesn’t matter that in all my previous hurtles across the void of unknowing, I have always made it. Each time I am afraid I will miss, that I will be crushed on the unseen rocks in the bottomless chasm between the bars. But I do it anyway. Perhaps this is the essence of what the mystics call the faith experience. No guarantees, no net, no insurance policy, but you do it anyway because somehow, to keep hanging onto that old bar is no longer on the list of alternatives. And so for an eternity that can last a microsecond or a thousand lifetimes, I soar across the dark void of ‘the past is gone, the future is not yet here.’ It’s called transition. I have come to believe that it is the only place that real change occurs. I mean real change, not the pseudo-change that only lasts until the next time my old buttons get punched.

“I have noticed that, in our culture, this transition zone is looked upon as a "no-thing", a no-place between places. Sure the old trapeze-bar was real, and that new one coming towards me, I hope that’s real too. But the void in between? That’s just a scary, confusing, disorienting "nowhere" that must be gotten through as fast as unconsciously as possible. What a waste! I have a sneaking suspicion that the transition zone is the only real thing, and the bars are illusions we dream up to avoid, where the real change, the real growth occurs for us. Whether or not my hunch is true, it remains that the transition zones in our lives are incredibly rich places. They should be honored, even savored. Yes, with all the pain and fear and feelings of being out-of-control that can (but not necessarily) accompany transitions, they are still the most alive, most growth-filled, passionate, expansive moments in our lives.

“And so, transformation of fear may have nothing to do with making fear go away, but rather with giving ourselves permission to "hang- out" in the transition between trapeze bars. Transforming our need to grab that new bar, any bar, is allowing ourselves to dwell in the only place where change really happens. It can be terrifying. It can also be enlightening, in the true sense of the word. Hurtling through the void, we just may learn how to fly.”

I am enamored these days of liminal spaces, those spaces in-between. I am spending my days thinking about them, exploring them, talking to people who are living in them; airplanes create odd liminal spaces, and so does any transition, from life to death, from here to there.

Do you remember monkey bars? The hot feeling in your palm, that squared off place where your fingers meet you fleshy palm, the heat that is generated by the holding on? It was hard for me to navigate monkey bars as a child; I dreaded letting go. I would hold until any momentum that my body had held up to that point was gone, a dead weight strung straight down from the bar, its metal becoming hotter in my palm. And then I would have to drop down, off the bars, not moving forward or back, but down, my palms smelling metallic the rest of the day to remind me. Marilyn Ferguson has written, “It’s not so much that we’re afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it’s that place in between that we fear…it’s like being between trapezes. It’s Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There’s nothing to hold on to.”

There’s nothing to hold on to.

I was a young college freshman taking a first semester existentialism class that met at eight o’clock in the morning (that sounds like a bad sitcom) when I first heard of Sam Keen. I read his essay, “The Peach Seed Monkey” in his book, To a Dancing God, an essay now buried beneath a jagged display of hash marks, underlining that highlights almost every word. Perhaps now, thirty years later, there would be more reserved marginalia, more adult discretion—that’s what happens sometimes with age, that dampening down of enthusiasm. Reserved or not, I have a special place in my wizened heart for Sam Keen.

“To remain alive and vital we must be able to swing back and forth between seeming opposites,” Keen once wrote. Howard Thurman told Keen that “the hard thing when you get old is to keep your horizons open. The first part of your life everything is in front of you, all your potential and promise. But over the years, you make decisions, you carve yourself into a given shape. Then the challenge is to keep discovering the green growing edge.” To keep his green growing edge, Keen learned to fly on a trapeze in his 60s. He had always wanted to fly.

Sometimes letting go is shedding, it seems, like a snake sheds its skin in times of growth. I was struck by this description of that process, how like a snake our letting go can be:

“Shedding is the process by which snakes periodically discard the outer portion of their skin. This activity is associated with growth. Young snakes shed more frequently than older ones because growth is relatively rapid in the first few years of life. Healthy snakes usually have little or no difficulty with shedding and tend to shed their skins in one entire piece. The stresses associated with shedding can be substantial. The shedding process is preceded by a period of relative inactivity. The underlying new skin is soft and vulnerable to damage while the outer layers prepare to slough away.”

And so it is with humans.

“Do you know what it means to fly?” Brooke Stevens once wrote. “ To fly is to live. It’s the same thing…That’s your problem, you’re not alive. You have no life and that’s not an easy thing to find. First, you must learn to fly…Once you learn to fly, it’s easy.”

In May 1999, Vegetarian Times profiled Keen after the publication of his book, Learning to Fly: Trapeze—Reflections on Fear, Trust, and the Joy of Letting Go. “Two weeks before his 62nd birthday,” they explained, “the Harvard Divinity School graduate and former Psychology Today editor swung from his first flying trapeze and discovered freedom through flight.” 

“When it comes to attitudes about flying,” the article continued, “people fall into three distinct groups: those who don’t believe it’s possible, those who’ve soared only in their dreams and the rare few who have actually experienced flight. ‘On those days when my emotional life is in turmoil and I feel graceless, inept and impotent, I sometimes climb the pedestal, swing out over the chaos of the world and make one flawless move,’ Keen writes. ‘For a brief moment, a simple back-end uprise becomes a prayer in motion. My small gesture of mastery establishes a beachhead from which I launch an expedition to free myself from the dominion of incompetence, fear, panic and worthlessness.’”

"The aerial art,” Keen writes, “celebrates ‘the passing moment, beautiful beyond belief’. That is every man and woman’s story."

That moment when there is nothing to hang on to is the moment when we are most present, most alive, most vulnerable, most human, most catchable.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

Here’s some advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

Learn the fall before the trick.

Smile and point your toes.

And wait for the right moment, Keen tell us: “Waiting for the right instant—what the Greek philosophers called the kairos or fertile moment—is exactly what is most difficult…Anxiety makes us too eager or too reluctant and forces us to act too early or too late. It is difficult to believe that, at times, as T.S. Eliot said, ‘The faith, the hope, and the love are all in the waiting.’”

Let go of the monkey bar. Be a connoisseur of fear. Enjoy the space between.

Fly.

[After you’ve learned to fall.]

Here’s what I was writing about last year this time: Draw Circles