by KJ Melin

I’m fascinated by transitions. The precise moment between the release of the last tenuous grasp of the familiar, and the new becoming fully formed charms me. That point is almost impossible to identify and like many, I used to rush to escape the discomfort in its uncertainty.

As an engineer I studied forces, vectors and how objects or energies change directions. My earnest knowing of this conversion point – and I suspect the reason I avoided it so long – came years earlier courtesy of incomplete rotations of backflips and the slightest misplacements on the balance beam of fingers or toes. Gymnastics was an unplanned pillar of my life; borne out of the loving response of parents who recognized I needed to learn to fall safely after the night I, at the tender age of three, climbed the doorframe of my bedroom then discovered I couldn’t get down. Eventually I called for help though not before I took in the world from my newfound height. Straddling the doorway with my head grazing the ceiling, I was simultaneously scared and captivated. This aerial freedom changed me.

I deeply craved movement and gymnastics was my salvation. It was also a relentless teacher. A series of acrobatic maneuvers could quickly land me on my head. I fell. Often. The complexity of skills grew, along with the speed at which they were performed and my own body’s abilities. I still fell. For more than a decade I trained to learn increasingly difficult techniques, to strengthen and coordinate muscles, to bend, perform, defy gravity and push limits in all directions. The falls carried greater force as I improved though their frequency lessened. I began to feel the edges of what my body was capable of doing and to adapt rapidly to subtle changes. Over time and with practice, I mastered a fluency of my physical being.

After years falling at every stage and refining my expertise, an intimate and unexpected relationship emerged. While gravity could still humble me, I befriended the mighty force and occasionally was graced with that elusive moment of transition. It was a blissful, miniscule pause mid-air that could only be felt, as if both time and my being were suspended before gravity took over from my original impulse against it. Everything lived in that emptiness. It was the sense of pure, boundless potential.

Movement is my mother tongue. Other forms of expression remain awkward by comparison, subjecting me to gravities that bruise different areas than I’m accustomed. I fall. Often. Echoes of a familiar pattern of learning remind me that the sweet surrender of mastery wasn’t available as a beginner, nor until I learned to work with and yield to a force greater than myself. If I’m lucky and don’t hurry through this transition, I may be offered another embrace with the potential first glimpsed atop the doorway so long ago: the exhilaratingly precious moment when something new begins.