Running into the wind

It was the fall and I was at One Life fitness, across the street from my old job at the Chiropractor. It was either an evening or afternoon and I was kind of going through the motions. I mean both the motions of working out and the general motions of life when things aren’t quite where I think they should be. My playlist ran up and Spotify decided to play a radio based on it and I thought that was fine-- I was in the cool-down/cartwheel phase of my workout anyway. This song by Sleeping At Last came on called Pluto, and let me be the first to tell you it’s one of those almost perfect songs which knows exactly how to give your brain a little serotonin push in the right direction. I say almost because it could be a little bit longer but I digress. My day was made, my week was made, and I still freak about it to this day.

Besides all of that there were lyrics (as songs often have) that helped me see something very important about the world. All my life I’ve either intentionally lived amongst the troubles and intense feelings or else I’ve tried to ignore them and live high above the world, metaphorically speaking. When it got too hard to walk on the earth I’d go off and live in space, where I couldn’t be troubled or weighed down. Out there I was finally free. Growing up I dealt with a lot of feelings of inadequacy, grief, anger, guilt, and I learned to suppress them in my teenage years. Over the past few years as I’ve hit adulthood I’ve been working to bridge the gap between too much and not enough. I heard this song and made sudden sense of my habits and woes. The unfortunate thing about ‘gravity’ is that escaping it, leaving earth behind, isn’t actually freedom. That’s the point. Breaking through the upper levels of the atmosphere and leaving the world far behind may take the weight off your shoulders but I’ll let you in on a secret: spacemen get really, really lonely. Up there you may be weightless, but you’re not free. You’re just a slave to something else.

Of course I’m not talking about space and gravity, obviously. The good life is not the easy life. Escaping from your troubles is just gonna leave you with different troubles; Solla Sallew ended up being locked, and our stalwart hero couldn’t get in despite everything he’d been through. This is a troubled world. That’s kind of the deal, y’know? You could try taking it the opposite direction. If escape isn’t the answer, maybe embracing is. I tried that, multiple times. When I was 18 and suddenly feeling a bunch of intense feelings I thought “yeah, that’s how things are supposed to be.” Turmoil and constant change felt like the right call. It wasn’t. Maybe it was better than the alternative, but I missed something then too. So, if escaping isn’t freedom, and indulging isn’t, then what is? What’s the point of hope, or resistance? Well, there’s another song that lends some thoughts. “I think I’ll try defying gravity.” If escape isn’t the way then what is? Flight. Metaphorically speaking. That’s my goal; I don’t want to escape gravity; I want to defy it. I want to fly. I want to be one of the people Steve Harvey was talking about in that motivational talk I heard him do once; I want to fly. Even then, so many times, we find ourselves crashing back into the earth we lept from.

Troubles are a lot like wind. They push us around every which way. We find ourselves balanced in a precarious spot and every single trouble is trying to knock us down with just the force of moving air. Try as we might we can’t do anything about it either. It’s like boxing against air. Some people stand against it for fun, some do it out of defiance, and some don’t resist at all. There’s a funny thing about ‘running against the wind,’ though. You’re one good pair of wings away from flying. Feeling the air swell beneath you and lift you off the ground. You find that the troubles you were running from (or against) end up lifting you. You’re free now, free to soar. You’re free to fall and to rise back up again. The question remains: where can we get a pair of wings?