The Geometry of Balance
When I was ten, my brother tried to teach me how to balance on a wooden board with wheels. He told me that the trick wasn’t in the feet, but in the way I held my breath. I spent the entire afternoon falling, my palms scraped raw against the driveway, until I finally understood that you cannot force a center of gravity. You have to surrender to the lean. There is a specific, fleeting tension in that moment—the fraction of a second where you are neither standing still nor fully moving, but suspended in a state of grace. As an adult, I find that I am still looking for that exact point of suspension in everything. We spend so much of our lives bracing for impact, forgetting that the most honest way to exist is to let the momentum carry us, trusting that our bodies know how to find the ground again. What is it that keeps us upright when the world is constantly pulling us toward the pavement?
José J. Rivera-Negrón has captured this exact feeling of suspension in his image titled Moment on the Walk. It is a beautiful reminder of how we navigate the world with nothing but our own rhythm. Does this image make you want to find your own balance today?
