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I was thinking recently about physical motion--specifically forward motion, and I remembered that I used to love to skip. I don't know when I stopped skipping. Maybe when you reach a certain weight your knees can no longer support that one-footed jump. Or maybe it just seems unbecoming and undignified to skip. I do remember that skipping takes a great deal of energy and will tire you out much faster than walking the same distance.
Related movements are hopping and jumping, leading to our expressing the nearness of a destination as simply a hop, skip, and jump away from where we are now.
Physical motion leads to action verbs. Now, "sit" is a verb that denotes an action, but it could hardly be called an action verb (and I have to admit that to sit is one my favourite verbs to enact).
Slide. Skate. Hobble. Toddle. Lope. Run. Hurdle. Jog. Bounce, even, though its motion is more vertical than forward. When I come back (i.e., in my next life, if I'm lucky/unlucky enough to be human again and not a slug or a grasshopper) in that next life I'm going to make it a point to learn to ice-skate from my earliest years so that I can glide (action verb) gracefully around the oval of a rink.
I used to roller-skate. Like all children of those times I had skates that you fastened on to your shoes (your Oxfords, not your tennis shoes) with screw clamps at the toes that required a special skate key that one could never find when it was time for skating. One summer a roller skating rink came to our town, situated in a large tent on the east side of town; it became the place to hang out. You could rent the appropriately-wheeled skates (ordinary sidewalk skates weren't allowed). So all summer long I rented skates, seething with envy of my friends ("the girls") who had managed to persuade their parents to buy them their own white, high-topped roller skates, as elegant as any figure skater's.
I began my campaign, asking for roller skates for Christmas or my birthday. I wanted them. It was a long and arduous process for my parents to find a pair, living as we did in the heart of nowhere. Finally (I found out later) my aunt Jeannette bought the skates for me while on a rare pre-Christmas shopping trip to Indianapolis, so skates were under the tree for me that year. Purchased at great cost and emotional energy, but finally mine.
Summer came and the skating rink tent opened again. Unfortunately, "the girls" had shifted their attention to . . . whatever. Boyfriends? Tennis? Whatever it was that deflected them from skating, no one skated any longer. So of course I didn't skate, either. The skating rink was not where I wanted to be. I never wore my beautiful, brand-new white, high-topped roller skates. Never.
So there's a moment of shame to contemplate. There's a memory when the action verb (to skate) failed to move me forward.
Let's move on to "hurdle", a vigorous action verb. One can hurdle all obstacles (usually metaphorically) or one can get out there on the track team and actually leap those hurdles that keep arising in your path. The faster you run between hurdles, the more quickly the next hurdle appears before you. I cannot contemplate leaping over even one of those wooden frames. My older brother was a hurdler. How did he do it? A mystery.
Have I now exhausted my thoughts on physical forward motion? And does all physical motion have to be forward? Are we meant to keep moving forward or die, like a pool full of sharks?
If I look at another category of being, the mental, can I truthfully say that I'm moving forward? No, on all mental levels (including memory and arithmetic) my movement is decidedly backward. Ah, well.
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com
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