The Weight of Gravity

I was standing at the top of the steep hill on my street this morning, waiting for my dog to finish sniffing a patch of clover. I watched a cyclist fly past, leaning so far into the curve that I instinctively held my breath. It looked like a dangerous surrender. We spend so much of our lives trying to stay upright, trying to keep our feet firmly planted on the pavement and our schedules neatly organized. We fear the slide. We fear the moment where we lose our grip on the ground and let the world pull us forward. But there is a strange, quiet freedom in that kind of descent. When you stop fighting the slope and simply let the momentum take over, the noise in your head finally goes silent. You aren’t thinking about the next errand or the email you forgot to send. You are only the speed, the wind, and the road beneath you. Is it better to hold on tight, or to see what happens when you finally let go?

Blair Horgan has captured this exact feeling of surrender in his image titled Downhill Skating. It reminds me that sometimes the most beautiful way to travel is to stop resisting the pull of the earth. Does this image make you want to lean into the curve, or does it make you want to step back?