gymnastics
For about one year my former passion and close-to-full-time-occupation is put on hold. It all started out with the obvious "learning" excuse, employed by almost every healthy procrastinating 19 year old student. It's the tool for everything you ever have been wishing to reject.
Me: Sorry that I didn't come to the training that often recently, but finals are ahead and the work is just massive, you know?
Trainer wife: I know, your schedule is just soooo tight. Just try to shevel some space for training in the future.
[That's the worst thing: she's just so understanding. Why? Maybe because she never had finals herself.]
Four months later:
Trainer wife: We're missing you [tone: relatively kind, as usual. When I got the offer to train with a more successfull group of a friended club that was lead by a domina person who never spoke in friendly tones, I rejected the offer. One of my basic wrong decisions of the road away from success?], thought you were not here anymore...hahaha [typical mid class woman around 40: I wanna lead an average life, not mediocre, average...but I've got my passsions: Dancing and gymnastics]...hahaha
Me: Well, you know, college is tougher than expected [so true...]...not much of the ole easygoing student atmosphere left there. I just come home when training's finishing [particularly true]...
following: Promise to arrive on a certain date...I won't appear ....due to examination, paper writing or other work.
While the summer proceeded, the finals already in my back, I continued to stay home, pretending to forget the existence of the gymnastic hall down the street. Maybe I chose the whole gymnastic thing as some kind of a symbol for a sinking life, the pre-final, school life of preservation, innocence and ease.
I was laying on our balcony, sleeping, as if I had been awake for the past twelve months. Pretending to forget that I was supposed to go to the gymnastics training at 6 o'clock, just as I'd been doing it for the past ten years.
Thus I slept.
With the lack of training visits my fear to accidentally meet my trainer couple on the street rose drastically. Everytime I'd leave the house the thought of running into them determined my conspirative looks and secret moves.
Practically my house is right in the middle of the relatively short way to "the hall". About 300 metres are between "the hall", me and the couple's place (they're sharing with two little children.). Not much space to find any trees or other botanics to hide.
The memory of going to "the hall" goes way back to the times, in which I learned to write and read. Gymnastics was there in my life since I can remember. And since it began to exist with and for me, there was a steady rise of skills and challenges, of power and success. I got better and better and better. I guess the "gestreckter salto", that just happened out of a failed flick flack (too high) was the climax of my gymnasticle life. The downfall already started when I a till that day- super kind kid started to do little cravings with my fingernails on the leathery top of the wooden boxes you use for certain gymnastic practices.
On that day, my image changed.
Then there was that incident, where I came close to driving straight into my then pregnant trainer wife. When her child was born and under recurrent influence of our team's "hall"-education I almost "dropped" her son in an unforeseeable playing accident. (I wasn't actually holding him up on my arm. I was just driving him on the little vehicle for the "M
However, as time went by I came to understand that
a) gymnastics ( or Turnen, as we call it in this country) is a great physical education, one of the few kinds of sports that keeps all parts of your body in pretty astonishing shape (or harrasses the most unknown parts of your anatomy). In addition to that it is great fun to watch all of that: The dynamics of bodies in motion. One of the greatest tricks of gymnstastics though is the specator's conviction of easyness, the lightness of a flying floating human body, the power of legs, feet, hands, arms. No other sport -besides track and fields- gets to be that pure and honest.
b) purity is not what comes to mind when I see these 15 year old bulimy sick girls with too muscular arms, too muscular legs and a bad haircut. It's not a pretty picture if these doll like kids strive off their bathing shoes to do their artificial as usual salto, flick flack bla bal line...as usual...just to get into their bathing shoes again , so that they can walk into the dressing room to throw up.
It's that kind of artifical atmosphere, that is up in the air even at the lowest of regional competitions.
I've recognized now that, as far as gymnastics is concerned, theory is far beyond what happens in real life. I don't want to learn the parts of exercises, that seem to be invented for the next 100 years of gymnastics history.
I want to do a sport that manages to challenge me on a creative level. Because creativity and dynamics are two of the main elements that ought to make this sport what it is...beautiful, surprising and stunning.
A possibility to show off what we're able to honestly do with our body in grace.
Slowly I start trying not to think of my gymnastics while hearing that damn urgent sound of our ringing phone. Try not to think that the male or female part of the trainer couple is on the other end of the line. Try not to think about them while walking down the street.
There are still a lot of other things left unresolved in my life that I fear confronting, when hearing the ringing phone, though. For example: My neighbour who borrowed me some cope of a freaking musical that was staged a couple of years ago in our hometown (my brother acted in the second part of it). (Damn, I haven't even opened the copy. Gonna throw it in his mailbox tonight, when it's dark.)
For now, I gotta go to the tennis court. Gotta play within an hour. The past three matches were damn good...as far as my own results were concerned. By any unlucky chance I will see my trainers car parked on the lot in front of our courts, because they will be on the annual team competition.
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