A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [30]
One part of this transition involved high jumping. I had always, since I was a child, loved that sport more than all others. In fourth grade I made myself a pit and standards out of inner tubes, an old mattress, packing blankets, two-by-fours, nails, and a bamboo pole that I had begged from a florist. I quit jumping when the mattress rotted, but jumped again in ninth grade, before dropping the sport until college.
In my sophomore year of college, I took a handball class, because it happened to fit my schedule. There were too many people for the number of courts, so each day the teacher, who was also the track coach, made the others run laps. It didn't take me long to gravitate to the high jump pit. The coach caught me. I thought he would yell at me for not following his instructions, but he asked me to go out for the team. This scared the hell out of me, and I said no. During the next class period I was again assigned to run, and so again I jumped. Again he asked, and again I said no. We repeated this little dance of wooing and retreating until finally I had the confidence to say yes.
Confidence is central to high jumping. If you believe you'll make it, you probably—unless the jump is very easy—won't. You must know you'll make it, enough that all consciousness of self vanishes.
After I'd been jumping a couple of years, I noticed a seeming contradiction in my coach's behavior. He routinely yelled at distance runners, and I'd seen him as a football coach slam his clipboard to the ground, but with me he was nothing but gentle, never once raising his voice. I asked why; not that I wanted the other, but simply because I was curious.
"Everyone knows that if you yell at a high jumper he'll just start crying, and then he can't do anything."
He was right. Had he yelled at me, I would have become self-conscious.
The blurring of boundaries between self and other in high jumping probably provides a key to my early love for the sport, a bridge between the walls I erected to protect me from emotions raised by my father's abuse and the dismantling of those walls years later. In both cases—abuse and high jumping—those boundaries disappeared. As a child, they disappeared because I was of necessity hyperaware, always alert to sounds, sudden movements, the slightest change in musculature or vibes that might indicate the possibility of an attack, that might give me an additional half-second to prepare for my father's violence by psychically absenting myself. Instead of remaining present to my own experience, I was present to my anticipation of his experience. My own self—whatever that means—was silent and submerged.
When I jumped, those boundaries between self and other once again became obscure. This time, though, the blurring was accomplished not by hiding the self, but expanding it. On the best jumps, those where I approached that ragged edge of control where instinct and euphoria set me free from time and consciousness, the self grew and dissolved until there was no meaningful separation between me and the rest of the world. The bar and the standards, the pit, the slight breeze in the late April afternoon, the sun, the grass, me, we all worked together.
Because all sports are artificially separated from life, and because high jumping is especially circumscribed—you jump, you sit for half an hour, then you jump again—it became safe for me to feel my emotions in that area. Moreso even than feeling them, I allowed them to overwhelm me, giving up control until I no longer felt the exuberance, joy, anger, but instead became them.
I was an excellent jumper, made for the sport both physically and emotionally, but I took to throwing tantrums when I missed important jumps. I'd curse and hurl my sweats, or sometimes pull my shoe partway off and kick it as far as 1 could—thirty yards was my best. Each time I did this, my coach pulled me aside and put his