Face Your Freedom
Face your freedom. That's what my good friend Darren said to me the other day. It caught my attention because most of the time we are told to face our fears. It was his funny, casual way of flipping around the phrase that stuck to my mind, like gummy taffy on the roof of your mouth. I keep playing with it, rolling it around and trying to figure it out. Face your freedom. I've been thinking about it, and the real meaning - the rabbit hole - seems to get deeper the more I explore it.
What are we really scared about anyway? We are a society that spends an awful lot of time and energy focusing on the things that we fear. If it's not terrorists, it's pollution, if it's not pollution, it's the freaky neighbor with a pit bull. Fear seems to dog us, chase us, linger over us like the remnant stench of dirty socks. It clings, sticks, and attaches itself to our communal psyche. But is it really the "bad things" that scare us or is it something else?
I've been an acrobat for over 10 years. One thing that people constantly ask me is, "is your job scary?" I say, "sure!" There's an explanation to my quirky enthusiasm - fear pushes me to my edge, fear keeps me in a state of unwavering alertness, of heightened sensitivity. When it's appropriate, these elevated states are great - beneficial for the soul, the way a sharp sword is forged from heat and repeated pressure. There is nothing not scary about being an acrobat; the whole point of throwing yourself into 360's is to taste the bitter shock of losing your balance, of teetering on the tip of temporary extinction. It's about throwing the bait to the lions just to see how fast you can run. In the end, you tempt fate to see if you can squeeze that extra half turn in. Not logical but definitely fun.
But I've been re-thinking fear and freedom. Darren is great for throwing twists - not only in the air, but also in linguistic gymnastics. What if I was afraid of my freedom? Am I? Then I began to think about the times that I threw myself into moves with hesitation. There are obvious explanations to doubt and resistance in acrobatics. Everyone knows that you can land on your head in a back flip. Everyone knows that you can fall 20 feet, 40 feet, or 100 feet to your death climbing a rope or doing high-flying aerial acrobatics. You could be embarrassed by fudging your choreography and fear the sting of a mocking audience. These are all worthy things to be scared of, and no artist has truly crossed the threshold of professional performance without being subject to them. But is this what I really fear?
