The Pendulum of Breath

Gravity is a heavy promise, yet we spend our earliest years trying to defy it. We climb, we leap, we hang suspended in the air, convinced that if we kick hard enough, we might just unhook ourselves from the earth. There is a particular rhythm to this—a pendulum swing that measures time not in seconds, but in the height of a reach and the sudden, hollow drop of the stomach. It is the architecture of weightlessness, a brief rebellion against the ground that claims us all eventually. We are never more honest than when we are mid-air, caught between the push of the past and the pull of the descent. We learn then that the joy is not in the landing, but in the arc, in that fragile, fleeting second where the world falls away and we are nothing but motion and wind. What happens to the weight we carry when we finally learn to let the swing carry us instead?

Ryszard Wierzbicki has captured this exact suspension in his beautiful image titled Boys on the Swings. Does looking at them make you want to push off from the ground again?