My relationship with gravity
by Andrew Gordon MiddletonI remember when I first learned to move my feet.
That night, for a few lovely moments, I felt a bit like my favourite CGI segment, that bit in Peter Jackson’s King Kong where Kong is fighting the T-Rexes. I was just fighting some other human so far as I could tell, and this is likely for the best. But doing this dance, fighting my T-Rex, reminded me something I otherwise knew but would always forget. I forgot to dance. I forgot my feet. I forgot to move and dance and bump my body around. When I remembered, it seemed to be when I was making like I was boxing and I fake like I was dancing, just like a friend who can only pronounce Japanese halfway properly when he is in comic-mode, putting on a show.
Going back to the other Rumble in the Jungle, the fight between Ali and Foreman and you learn some other things about dancing. You watch old Ali footage and you watch him dance. You watch him dance like he told George Foreman he would when Ali himself was afraid of the fight. Ali told Foreman he was going to dance dance dance. This even got George Foreman to practice his dancing. And George Foreman is a big man.
But when the fight came, the Rumble in the Jungle, Ali didn’t seem to do what he’d said he would. He sure didn’t look like he was dancing, doing this Rope-a-Dope. But then Ali understood what I started to understand that night and what Kong definitely understood.
You have to develop a good relationship with gravity.
Foreman may have been ready to dance. But maybe he forgot what this really meant, defining the relationship between himself and the ground. Ali, on the other hand, knew exactly what he was doing even if he was just making it up as he went along. He knew where he was with gravity. And just like gravity does for the funny elastic creatures that we are, he used elasticity that wasn’t even his.
Because this seems to be the trick. Or, if the trick is realizing that everything is built around our relation to gravity, then the next trick comes easier. The next trick is to learn again how to stay standing. And the best way for this seems to be playing with our natural elasticity.
If not, during any of these rumble in the jungle segments, well, how’d you stay standing? The drill that I participated in started on the ground, one partner in the guard of another but neither trying to lock or attack the other, just putting pressure on them, forcing them to keep moving. Then we transitioned to standing, without stopping and still playing with this pressure. What this translates to—because there’s no ground to push off of and to push your partner against and off of—was this baby rumble in the jungle, Kong against the Rexes. I think I learned more in this drill than I had for a while. But then it still seemed so natural that I’m trying to remember where I’ve done this for years.
I think I get it from running through trees except, in that case, it is always me who gets thrown. Maybe that’s where the deja vu comes from. Or maybe I’ve just really internalized that CGI. I think it must be the trees. Take the scenario where you’re running down a hill, through the trees, but the hill is too steep to really manage at the speed you’re at. So you need to grab the trees but not grab the trees. Hook them in the crook of your arm but letting them go almost at the same time so you don’t rip your arm off. You arms have got to be tensed so you don’t just fall and start rolling uncontrollably down the hill but not so much that you stop or get them ripped off. You catch but don’t catch. And during this drill I felt the same thing. If you hook your partner too hard, you will get into muscling and forcing against each other. But if you hook lightly enough—pretend he’s a tree and you are falling down the hill—then you can let gravity let you fall into him; instead of using your recoil to fall to the next tree, you use your recoil to unbalance him and make yourself tumble into standing so you can do it all again.
Kong was more about saving his girl but I think if we asked him he’d say something like how he just noticed that he was falling anyway and worked on how to direct that force.
And just like gravity’s still the holy grail for physicists, maybe it’s something we all have to try to remember more than we think. We can deal with it by posting against the ground, arranging our sticks of meat so we don’t—most of the time—fall. Or we can deal with it by bouncing, by not forgetting about the big G, by being elastic and always moving over the ground. Teasing the ground like we are going to fall and wouldn’t the big ol’ ground just love a taste of us. But we stay in balance over it, transitioning from one elastic leg to the other and back again. Once we stop this, once we post with both legs over the ground, we are setting ourselves up to really fall. We stop and whatever wants to catch up with us does.
The difference is like when you are running. You can plod along, one foot after the other in that can’t-be-bothered kind of way, plodding along putting on the brakes way that people can get away with wearing their big elevator Nike Airs, like they aren’t having anything to do with their environment anyway; or you can run with some sensitivity, staying in balance, poised and bouncing off the ground as you go over it. Falling but not falling. Constantly falling and constantly catching ourselves.
And of course breathing comes into this. Anything where we’re talking about elasticity and rhythm naturally comes back to the breathing. By keeping the channels open, keeping the breathing cyclic, it helps this bouncing. And the bounce isn’t something freakish and doesn’t even come from having excessive energy. But it is taking that energy and maybe playing a bit with gravity. We’re tired. I was tired. Long day. But by staying centred I was doing the natural in taking the resilience of each of my legs and centring over one then the other.
There are other questions here. Like what might have happened if Foreman didn’t volunteer for it, if he’d danced himself and had some awareness of his own relationship with gravity. Ali couldn’t have lounged around like that, dancing against the ropes. But gravity was paying attention. It caught up to that big man and it knew how to direct the force.
Try it yourself some time. Ignore gravity for a weekend or on some government holiday or just when you have some time off. Let me know how well you do.
