The Weight of Gravity

I was walking home from the grocery store this morning when I saw a young boy jump off a low brick wall. He didn’t look down to check his landing; he just launched himself into the air with his arms wide, eyes squeezed shut, as if he expected the sky to hold him up. For a split second, he was suspended, completely untethered from the pavement. It made me realize how much of our adult lives are spent keeping our feet firmly planted, calculating the impact before we even move. We worry about the landing, the friction, the inevitable return to the ground. But there is a specific kind of freedom in that moment of flight, a total surrender to the air. We spend so much energy trying to be steady that we forget the joy of simply letting go, even if it’s only for the length of a heartbeat. When was the last time you jumped without checking where you would land?

Ryszard Wierzbicki has captured this exact feeling of weightlessness in his photograph titled Caught in the Air. It reminds me that we are all capable of finding that brief, beautiful suspension if we just stop looking at the ground. Does this image make you want to jump, too?