leap

there is a presumption in our society that those who do not, or cannot, move at a culturally-determined pace are doomed. we have come to believe that, like sharks, we will suffocate if we are not in constant motion. we must always be moving, always be doing and never, at any cost, still. to stop is to die.

this is not questioned by most of us, most of the time, though there is plenty of evidence that "move forward or die" is little more than a story we have been told by others and continue to buy into. that society would like us to believe this story makes sense. that we do, less so. we do not have to be in constant motion to survive. in fact, if we wish to live, really live, we must set aside constant motion and step into a world that is often still. but to do that we have to take the frightening step of stopping while we still believe that we will die if we are motionless.

if we are able to do this, however briefly, we find that the world around us is not in constant motion, let alone in constant forward motion. it is not trying to get anywhere and we are not like a shark. we begin to see that the idea that we must keep moving, that we do not have time to be still, is just that, an idea. we can have other ideas and choose to believe that motion for its own sake is rather pointless. perhaps the story we have been told is keeping us from being in the world as we are meant to be: free to choose when to move and when to be still.

this discovery, of course, comes at a personal price. having been still we know that stillness exists. what we have taken for granted, we now know not to be true. the myth of motion is a little less solid and a little more difficult to maintain. stepping outside movement, we cannot deny that it has an end. we may choose to step back but we do so understanding that our story is just a story and a fairly hollow one at that. to leap into stillness is to give up our comfortable, if painful, understanding of ourselves and the world we live in: we are no longer exclusively those-who-move. we are something more.

a society that does not admit the possibility of stillness imposes its own penalties on those that step outside the myth of motion. it marginalizes those that stop moving with labels such as malcontent, radical, alcoholic, fool or mentally ill and drowns their question - must there be only motion? - in a flood of press release journalism, litigation and character assassination. in more dangerous times it calls them homosexuals, communists, reactionaries or treasonous fools and silences those who have stopped and begin to question more directly.

afraid of the consequences, we don't leap. we stay in the story. we chase and aquire, win and lose, climb and fall. knowing what might happen to us if we admit that there is something other than movement, we do not stop moving. we can't imagine being an outsider, even of the mildest sort, or what life might be like if we weren't always moving.

what we don't know and can't until we have leapt? that there is no reason to be afraid of being outside movement. like any story, the myth of motion only has the power to hold us while we accept it as the only way to live. once we step into stillness, we finally know that we are more than movement. we are not suffocating and the air we breath is sweet and ever new. we realize, maybe for the first time, that to be still is not to be doomed but to be completely alive. we are free.

leap.

tags: personal, practice, outsiders, freedom