Walking
the High Wire
“The
wire is a safe place for me to be. The street is not. Life is not.
It's a rigorous and simple path. It's straight. You don't have
meanders there like, you know, on the ground, in life.”
Philippe
Petit
Philippe Petit, you may
remember, is the French high-wire artist, who is best known for
walking a wire stretched between the two World Trade Center Towers in
1974. It seemed insane to me at the time, and, honestly, it still
does. But, for him, it's safe because it's predictable and there are
no “meanders” that might hold unpleasant surprises. Most of us
would like to have such a life; to be in control of every aspect so
that we could go from point (a) to point (b) with no curving lines
and no blind alleys.
Life down here on the
street is not safe. It is not straight and simple. You can't train
for a lot of what happens outside your tiny sphere of control—that
is, beyond your human body. You just have to play the cards you're
dealt, and some days they are great, and some days, not so much. We
have all sorts of human ways of trying to gain the advantage in this
game of life. We try to stack up as much money as possible, we put on
a ton of make-up so no one really knows what we look like, we wash
ourselves with germ killing soaps and chemicals, we don't step on
cracks, we place all manner of alarms and security apparatuses in our
homes, we hoard completely unnecessary things, some of us limit our
interactions so as not to encounter anything, or anyone, beyond the doors of
our safe space. When we have an unpleasant interaction with messy old
life, we scrub our hands extra hard, and redouble our efforts.
The problem with these
rigorous efforts to keep it straight-forward and controllable, is (1)
it's impossible to do, and (2) we block out all the good stuff along
with the bad—all the joy, all the serendipity, all the grandeur and
glory and awesome deliciousness of life itself. We can live in a cell
of our own making, or we can let go, and allow life to happen in all
its terrible and delightful manifestations. Or, I suppose, we can
learn how to walk on a high wire.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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