Free Falling
On this particular night, I filled our host’s bathtub with hot water and leaned back while the balmy breeze of a summer evening entered through the open window, along with live music from the garden of the pub next door. I stared at my tired white feet against the alien chrome fixtures of someone else’s bathtub, feeling very separate from the world.
Not sad, just separate. At one point, there was an oddly Irish rendition of Tom Petty’s “Free Falling”…gone were the LA references; the lyrics were mostly indecipherable to me, but mournful and yearning, and only the refrain was clear.
I’m free falling.
The song drifted into the bathroom, hovering over the tub. It was a lonely kind of free, a what-am-I-doing-here kind of free.
Then, somewhat jarringly, the music transmuted into a thumpy-thump sort of electronica, and I recognized “I Will Survive” and that made me think of my sister Marlene, for whom that song was a theme, and although she did not manage to survive the ravages of kidney disease, she manifested a ferocity and spirit while she stood.
And then of course I thought how weird it was to be here on another continent all these decades later, thinking about my sister and New York and how everything blurs together—and sometimes you just have to float above it.
And I floated, in a free falling way.
I have been thinking a lot about the scaffolding of my life, the frameworks and beliefs that keep me steady, or that give me the illusion of being grounded. I felt exhilarated, however, by some recent reading I’d done about conceptual shifts proposed by a biologist named Michael Levin (mentioned in a previous post). I read in a casual and superficial way, and much of it was beyond my comprehension, but it had left me with a sense of crazy possibility, a sense that the universe is even more amazing and implausible than I had ever imagined, and that instead of free falling, new perspectives might invite free flying.
Ironically, I received a message from my brother the next morning in which he wrote about his existential anxiety and depression, tied to feelings of dread when confronting the limitations of one’s existence. “In particular,” he wrote, “it’s an anxiety closely tied to freedom…the freedom to choose meanings, which is a frightening notion because it implies that there are no built-in meanings or definitions for what one’s life should be.”
It struck me as interesting that the lack of clear definitions, or the shedding of them, and the choosing of new ones, could either incite either fear or invite fascination.
Free falling into despair, or free flight into…who can say?
My brother is sixteen years younger than me, and the dynamics of our family were very different for him, but we both bear the scars of dysfunction and loss. He’s a brilliant and well educated person, with a PhD in psychology, and I have had these kinds of email conversations with him for many years.
The contrast in our thinking helps me see how deliberately I choose happiness and hope, and maybe it’s a form of denial or a survival technique, a kind of folly I have constructed because I’m even more afraid than he is. But I’m not likely to shift at this point. I have looked over the edge and into an abyss and I don’t care to return. I flap my unwieldy wings or grab onto a handhold and hoist myself back into the landscape of the unlikely but possible.
The lush leafy overstory above a narrow street never fails to delight me, and the play of sun and shade on a sidewalk, and the way it is still light at 9 p.m. as I sit in the bathtub pondering, and the party noises of the pub next door merge into a soundtrack of absurdity and defiance and I am floating and falling free.