A Step on Either Side
The final challenge of the high ropes course was to pair up and scale a 60-foot telephone pole, stand together on the tiny wooden platform on top, then jump. “Face your fears!” “Do what’s hard!” “Trust your buddy!” “Trust your body!” “Find a way!” My team’s 6’6” center and I stared up at the pole’s metal stakes designed for use as handles and steps, doing our best to breathe, naturally, not as if the intake could well be our last one.
As course instructors dressed us in harnesses and helmets while explaining the factors to consider when creating a how-to plan, we made both a verbal and eyeball commitment to not let one another down. After hashing out a strategy, then hugging for good measure, while quivering, my long, tall partner slowly began her ascent.
A climber attempts the telephone pole obstacle.
From the ground, I encouraged, implored, cheered and cajoled, as at the pace of a snail, she reached and pulled and stepped and pushed methodically up the pole. Finally arriving at the top, she carefully hoisted herself up onto the platform, unfolding her lanky limbs bone by bone. By the time she was upright, I was halfway up the pole.
“That wasn’t so bad,” I said to no one but the clouds and her. Then suddenly it hit me: the hard part hadn’t happened yet.
“Where am I supposed to put my feet?” I asked, eye level with the podium in the air where I, too, was supposed to stand. Her size 15 shoes took up almost every inch of the wooden pad.
I could see my player’s knees knocking as I tried to answer my own question. Cautiously contorting my body in a way so as not to brush her, I began twisting and squirming in search of a land grab and a method for straightening up. It was like trying to untangle the chain of a necklace in the dark with only my teeth. Somehow, eventually, I found a way to rise.
And there we were.
Sixty-feet in the air, Mutt and Jeff, holding hands and horrified together by completely different things.
“I don’t want to jump,” she said.
And I piped back, “I don’t want to stay here.”
Two humans wedged between the up and down.
Most every place worth getting to has an uphill halfway through. But unlike middles, in-betweens aren’t far away from either the start or the finish. Instead, they dance on the threshold that separates the two. Like an arm wrestle locked in a trembling lean or a game of tic-tac-toe with only a couple of spaces left, the next thing, while it’s not here yet, is clearly imminent. In-betweens dangle in liminal time, a space where we are privy to both sides of the boundary line.
And liminality is a juggernaut.
That space separating conception and birth, the filing of the papers and the decree of the divorce . . .the engagement and the wedding, the injury and the recovery, the terminal diagnosis and the death. Each comes wrought with a transition, the changing of a guard.
While being here is hard and being there is scary, it’s often the being here and there at once that wrecks us.
Footing is precarious on the plank of in-between.