🚡 defying gravity
or: what it means to truly be held in your hardest moments.
As I mentioned last week, I’m moving my questions and explorations over to the new ✨ beautiful chaos✨, as a way to more intimately explore the real question of our times - what does it mean to live a more human life in an age of machines?
If these are questions you also find yourself asking, especially as a parent or a neighbor or a friend, then I hope you’ll join me 📍here.
What’s a recent small moment that you have felt loved (romantic or not)?
I stared at the prompt siting on the table and let my mind wander.
Last week it was “Ski Week” in California and though I’ve never been a Skier, every season I attempt to play one on TV because my husband and our daughters love it.
So on Valentine’s Day, instead of being tucked in with my love language of good food and a great book, I found myself on the top of my first run in more than a year. Excited but nervous. I love sports. I love the outdoors. But somehow, I’ve never really gotten into the thrill of slapping two broad sticks on hard plastic boots and flinging yourself down an incline, using gravity as your guide.
But I digress. So there I was, at the top of this run, starting out my wobbly newbie S curves. I tentatively carved one, and then another, when suddenly it was like my body mutinied and stopped talking to my brain. At which point my brain sent out a distress signal saying halt all operations.
I had made it exactly 20 feet down the run.
I’ve never felt this before in my life. This loss of all physical intuition of what I’m supposed to do in this situation. All I could think about was Simon Biles when she pulled out of the Olympics due to a case of the Twisties - where the brain and body aren’t communicating.
It turns out it’s a thing that can happen in lots of situations were proprioception is critical and where stress or doubt can sever that critical link.
I’m sure the real thing is much more severe but this felt plenty serious because, did I mention, I was stranded at the top of a large incline paved with snow.
My husband and the girls were naturally already at the bottom. So with shaking hands I pulled out my phone and i just texted, “I’ve forgotten how to do this.”
I felt like such an embarassment.
But I was afraid. Terrified. Actually. And no amount of self talk was able to counteract the message my body was yelling at me.
J texted immediately back and said stay there, we’re coming back up. And so there I stood or rather, perched, with adrenaline filled legs.
After a minute or two, I figured i would try to right the situation myself. After all I was a rational, capable adult.
So I reached for Claude, my little AI chat buddy.
I’d found it helpful in other situations for it to outline the steps of something new or challenging. I figured I might be able to nudge my intuition by remembering the mechanics of turns and weight transfer.
And sure enough, Claude jauntily responding with the basics, though honestly, the tone was more annoyingly cheerful than I like in these kinds of situations.
But even as I read the text, my mind couldn’t make my body feel the wisdom of the words.
So I followed up, telling Claude that I had lost all intuition around the turns and managing the transition when, for a moment, you’re facing straight downhill.
But it kept repeating the same advice.
All accurate and encouraging, but not connecting with my freaking out, flooded mind.
Starting to feel worse, I put the phone away and waited for my people. Soon enough I saw with relief the bright colors of my little posse. My 11 and 14 year olds coming to a stop above me, my husband skiing down closer.
“I’ve totally forgotten how to do the turns” I threw out in their general direction, looking down into the snow in embarrassment.
I expect to hear my husband, attempting to talk me off this literal ledge.
But instead, it was the clear, sweet voice of our youngest that I heard.
I looked up and saw her moving into position.
“Ok, so the main thing is your pizza. You’re going to use it to make the turn. And then you’re just going to do an S.”
“But it’s when I turn both my skis downhill that I’m afraid of.” I said honestly.
“That’s when you use your wedge - watch me” as she proceed to show me this pint-sized turn with her skis turned into a pizza slice.
Not convinced but feeling like I had something to try, I urged my sticks into tidy angles and set off.
It wasn’t pretty but I made one turns and then another. And just when I felt the fear flooding the plains, I called A’s words back to me and made my legs face down hill in a pizza.
Over and over again. Still terrified but doing it. Until I had navigated the steepest part and I could practice more on the gentler slope.
“Mama! That was so good. Like at the end you weren’t even doing pizza! I cant even do that yet.”
Oh my sweet child. Look how that comforting lie flowed off your tongue and into my heart.
Needless to say it wasn’t a big ski day for me. I did a couple more runs after that so I wouldn’t pause scared, but I didn’t want to push it.
But as I sat in the lodge apres-skiing, adrenaline slowly leaching from my system, I was able to feel the full power of that moment.
My youngest - the baby of the family - the one who is said to be my personality doppelgänger, with her intensity and curiosity and big heart and big feelings. She who I’ve worked with over the past years to tackle things that felt scary and overwhelming and impossible.
Not with the absence of fear, but instead, through the fear, courage.
And on this Valuentine’s Day, she gave that gift of unbounded, unjudging, unconditional love back to me.
This, at its core, is what care is. What love is. And why, I think, we keep bothering with each other.
It’s so hard. It definitely would have been more comfortable and easier for me if I hadn’t come at all or if I had stayed in the chalet or even if I had only done that one run.
But I don’t want my life to be about the easy. For me, it’s about flinging yourself into that unknown (though for my part, I’ll prefer more flinging on even ground) and knowing you’ll be caught by the people who you also are an unyielding net for.
I’m sure we’re going to have incredibly capable AI agents and helpers and doers... More sophisticated ones that could have access to my heart rate or a visual on my stance and in general more capable of coaching me through the moment.
But capable is still not care.
Because I know, it wasn’t ever really about the mechanics. It was about those pesky things called emotions. The fear. The embarrassment. The doubt.
And for that, I needed a fellow human, tiny and wise beyond her years.
I needed to be able to voice those monsters, in the face of the fear of being judged by those I love most. I needed to let myself be vulnerable, safely, so that I could do a hard thing, safely.
And yes, hurrah, I faced my fears and I skied down. But this is not a story of accomplishment, but a story of care.
I felt loved. Deep unending love.
It is the ultimate gift of parenthood that is impossibly hard to tell anyone who isn’t a caregiver of a little human.
Insomuch as we’re still writing the story of humanity, this story is centered more on the love than it will ever be about the machines.
The machines are always existed to allow us to love and care in greater number and capacity. And that’s the lesson I hold onto now.
Even when we all have machines to hold our every weakness and doubt together, I hope we’ll still reach for the agony and the ecstasy of breaking open for each other instead.