The Pause Before the Pivot

In the pause before the pivot. In the space before the sway. In the silence before you speak, you will find what matters.

I went to a really small highschool. Like, whatever you are thinking, cut it in half, and then half it again. Still smaller, I’m sure, than the picture you’ve got, was the one hallway of classrooms I bounced around from grades nine to twelve. There were like, 40 kids in my graduating class. And that included students in non-traditional programs, so it actually felt smaller, somehow, than that. (The person who’s standing next to me in the photos documenting our march up to the dais is someone I did not know. We seamlessly syncopated our walk, though, so I’m not sure we qualify as strangers.)

I was involved in extracurriculars that introduced me to kids from other schools, which helped. Gave room for different perspectives through different friend groups. Back in the days of dial up and land lines, your community was mostly the reach of who you connected with IRL. And branching out helped me experiment with those things kids experiment with when they’re teenagers. You know, the DARE-ing stuff like, standing in the spotlight, or hugging close to the backstage curtains. Finding your voice and practicing how loud to use it. Deciding who you are, finding the truest version of you. The pressure cooker of youth, before InstaPots were ubiquitous.

One of the people I met through a peer-leadership-program I participated in - think drugs are bad, consent is good - was a few years older than me and insanely cool. She wore overalls, effortlessly, before it was trendy. She had poise at an age that most kids didn’t. Heck, she had poise that most of the adult mentors in the program didn’t. She could command a room in a way that included everyone in the process. And when she went off to college she studied dance. 

This was revolutionary to me for two reasons. 

1. Her choice in higher ed not only took her out of state, it took her out of New England, which was certainly the edge of my comfort zone. 

2. Her choice in higher ed meant she could study art. And everyone knew that whatever you studied in college was obviously the thing you would devote your whole life to, right? So she was declaring herself an artist at 18, which was also certainly the edge of my comfort zone.

Were we allowed to do that? I didn’t know we could do that. (Ok, sure, I knew it. But to see the option executed in real time, by a friend, that was a different LEVEL of knowing.)

When she was home on break one year, we went out for coffee. (Again, proof that she was very cool. Drinking coffee. In public. In a locally owned coffee shop that didn’t put several scoops of sugar into every cup.) There is an unwritten rule that when you are home for a short amount of time, everyone you’ve ever met wants to hang out with you. So another person I did not know came out with us and we all pretended to be much wiser than we were. (Me mostly.) And we all shared wisdom that we had gained. (Her mostly.) And we all wondered what it might take to have one on one time with a friend without having to make a new friend while you did. (Him mostly.)

Standing in front of the racks of magazines in Borders, she demonstrated how to find your center.

“Push me,” she told her friend, and he did, and she toppled over.

And then she took a deep breath and gained three inches while sinking six into the floor. She stretched, a plumb line running through her from the top of her head straight down the center of herself. An axis point appeared, and she, the globe. An axis point ran through, and she, a whole planet.

“Ok, now push me,” she said, and he did, and he stumbled back.

Centered, now, something shifted and she was solid.

He pushed her again, a tentative test to see what would happen, and she swayed this time, moving but still grounded. 

What she showed us was her pivot point, her very own axis. 

“It’s how we can spin and spin and spin and not fall over.”

A skill acquired young, in tap or ballet or modern. Whatever class connected her to her body at the beginning, and promised she would pivot, pivot, pivot, throughout her life. Dancer, she would learn to turn. Human, she would learn to pause. 

And you didn’t have to study dance to learn it. (And she didn’t have to study dance to teach it, but it helped.) She made us practice, and there, in front of the periodicals in a bookstore that no longer exists, we learned how to center.

In the pause before the push, we ground ourselves. In the pause before the push, we found ourselves. In the pause before the push, we let ourselves stretch, grow, become a whole planet.

And I had never seen that before. I didn’t know that we were capable of such a thing. Ok, sure, I knew it. I must have. Somewhere in my DNA is a small slice of a particle that was once a star, a supernova. And that little bit of me must’ve remembered the capacity we have for being big. For finding the edge of our comfort zone and moving past it. For taking up space and being solid enough to send something else off its trajectory. For taking up space, and learning how to absorb the energy of something else, and still remain solid ourselves.

But to see the option executed in real time, by a friend, that was a different level of knowing. 

You can be your own planet. A singular star in your own solar system. You can have moons, and rings, and call asteroids to you. You can be mostly gas, or mostly solid, and have others speculate about whether or not you have watery depths. You can have whole biospheres that grow and decay depending on how you sway on your axis. You can have an axis.  A point from which to spin as you move through your trajectory. A plumb line that helps you expand your energy up. Send your energy down. A fixed point from which to wibble-wobble without losing your orbit completely. A place from which to gain gravity and spin, and spin, and spin. A place from which to pause.

There is always a pause. The span of a year or half a breath, but it’s there. There is always space, to stand your ground, to fall over, to sway. There is silence, and a steadying, and the opportunity to find your axis point and gain gravity.

Still, stay still. Sway, still, sway. Fall into the space before the shift. Wait. There is a pause before the pivot.

And you, a whole planet, have such expansive space from which to observe it all. No matter how small you started.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading. 💚

-A