Swings Rule
First of all, this isn’t breaking my partial reading fast. It can’t be complete because of the text-based nature of work, and the internet keeps imposing with its important, time-critical emails. But other than these couple of things, I’ve been doing pretty well.
Tonight was thanksgiving dinner for my sister and I and at least 10 friends. We had a big turkey, plenty of mashed potatoes, cabbage rolls, a big pot of borscht, alcohol and more. It was an absolute blast. I haven’t enjoyed myself that much in quite a while.
When Regan and I returned, it didn’t feel like the night was quite over. We were still too wound up to call it quits, so we gathered beverages (water and orange juice) and headed towards the park/schoolyard to the north. We were there the night before as well, but this time we noticed the swings, including two of the kind with just the black rubber band seat that is capable of holding an adult bum.
Kids have it lucky. They have it tremendously lucky. First of all, swings are a surprisingly good form of exercise. After about an hour on the swings, I can fairly say that my abs and quads have not been worked that hard in a while. My biceps are, of course, too macho to complain. I’m sure they’ll do it tomorrow under the guise of bragging about how hard they worked.
Second of all, swings feel great. There’s just enough constant acceleration to keep a mild flow of adrenaline, and just a touch of a speed rush as you pass the ground. It’s tremendous, and almost feels like evidence that, at one point in its not so distant evolutionary past, humanity brachiated.
It also resurrects feelings and memories that you’d swear had died away for good, like that little bit of exhilaration when you get going high enough for the seat to start to fall away under your bum, the stutter in your faith in the integrity of the swings when you first feel the bar jiggle under your mighty arcs…
So why did we all stop? It was the point when we stopped wanting to play physical games and started wanting to be adults, and we made a game of the joyless, grinding workday that our parents lived through while we went on, largely oblivious. This turned into the little primate dramas of junior high school and into the more sophisticated tribal dramas of high school and then modern life. The swings and what they represent were lost, folded in with all of the other puerile, childish things that we left behind when we grew up and accepted subjugation.
