The Monkey Bars

At the end of the yoga class I participated in the other day, the teacher read to us from a book written by a person she very much admired. The excerpt she selected was about monkey bars.

More specifically the person whose words she read had made a rather astute correlation between traversing the monkey bars and navigating life in general.

The author revealed that when he was younger, he possessed no natural aptitude for swinging across the monkey bars. A sort of paralyzing fear would grip him, and he would be unable to let go of one bar in order to reach out for the next. As he allowed his fear to overtake him, his body would just hang, and become like dead weight. When he finally mustered up the courage to attempt to grab the next bar, it would prove too difficult as he had lost any momentum he may have had—momentum that would have inevitably made his passage from one bar to the next smoother, more graceful, perhaps even possible.

His overall point was that, during those moments on the monkey bars, he very much feared the time when he would have to let go of one bar and before he had gripped the new bar. He dreaded this transitional period, this unknown, this “space between.”

What an apt comparison for life! For it can be truly frightening when you know the only way to move forward is to release the grip you have on the past, and yet there is no assurance that you will have any more solid grip on the future; if you even make it that far. After all, you may fall or you may tire.

Or, perhaps worst of all, what if you hurl yourself forward with as much gusto as you can manage only to find that the journey you made was ultimately not worth your while after all?

This analogy may seem a bit trite considering the relative safety of this childhood recess-time activity is being juxtaposed with the very real difficulties inherent in navigating life itself. But I like it for its accessibility. And because if you know me at all, you are well aware that I feel about analogies the way I feel about ice cream treats–that is to say, I look for them absolutely everywhere I go and I very nearly love them all.

Incidentally, I always liked the monkey bars. Yet I also remember those moments of panic as I swung my ten-year-old body from bar to bar, only to discover that the next bar—the one I trusted to be as secure and reliable as the last—was unexpectedly loose, especially slippery, or ungraspable in some way.

When you think about it you wonder: how can you be certain that if you take that leap of faith the net will, in fact, appear?

And the truth is, of course, that you can never be certain.

How terrifying.

And how amazing, liberating, and exciting.

As we all know, to make any progress whatsoever—in life or on those monkey bars—you have to let go of the grip you have on your past in order to move into the future. The more resolutely you white-knuckle that which you are leaving behind, and the more time it will take you to move forward, the more momentum you will lose, and the harder the journey will be.

Our society, being very “future-focused,” does not encourage us to embrace the transitional periods, the liminal space between “here” and “there.” We live in a culture that is very much defined by where we have been and where we are going. We are not taught to be present. We are not encouraged to “stay in the question.” Rather, we are trained to have answers, plans, solutions, and destinations.

Ironically, and as the monkey bar story author pointed out, it is only when in the transitional space that you are the most aware, the most present, the most, well, you. It is in those spaces that true creativity thrives and blossoms. It is those spaces that make growth possible.

Personally, I am someone who has always struggled when the next step in my life is not clearly defined and mapped out for me, or by me. Dichotomous as ever, I am also someone who has regularly launched myself into new situations without giving them the appropriate consideration (umm, anyone remember when I enrolled full-time in woodworking school?). Basically, my modus operendai was to either sit around and wait in my comfortable space of the known until I could clearly see the next stair onto which I would carefully step, or else I would hurl myself forward just to feel I was doing something.

If you are reading between the lines, I historically have done about all I could to avoid having to spend any time in that middle, transitional area.

Right now, I feel a lot of my life is up in the air. Among some of the more pressing issues are the questions: Will I ever feel the urge to have children? Will I ever be truly excited and satisfied with my professional pursuits? And, of course, the answers to those questions would be able to add perspective to the larger, looming, question: What do I want my future to look like?

And the truth is that I do not currently have the answers to those questions. I am flying through the air at the moment, and unaware of exactly where the bar I eventually grab onto will lead me. For the first time in my life, I am actually enjoying the unknown. It has resulted in this blog, in a lot of self-reflection and some degree of self-awareness. I feel that in all of this not knowing what my life will be, I have found out a lot about what my life actually is.

Amazing what you can learn from the monkey bars.