Memories of movement and stillness
Jan. 15th, 2020 07:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Today is another January talking meme post, this time brought to you by montfelisky, who asked for a significant childhood memory.
Me being who I am, I couldn't narrow it down to one.
A lot of my memories from childhood are about reading. For example:
I remember when I read Gillian Rubinstein's Galax Arena for the first time, and realising that a) I found the protagonist and narrator profoundly boring and b) I sympathised with one of the antagonists and wanted to read more about her story (and started making up my own story about her in my head) and c) I was allowed to read and interpret fiction in this way, even if it went against the intentions of the author. I must have been about ten years old.
I remember the circumstances leading up to reading Northern Lights, the first in Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy for the first time. As happened almost every summer, my sister and I had gone to spend a week on the south coast of NSW, this time with our father, a week or so after Christmas (and after my birthday). As always, I'd been given a pile of books for both birthday and Christmas, and had been reading my way through them. Several days into the holiday it was extremely rainy, and I had read every book except Northern Lights, which was unappealing to me because it had this cover and I 'hated books about animals'. I must have been roaming around the house, whining that I had nothing to read, and annoying my sister, because eventually she found the copy of Northern Lights, said that I hadn't read that one, and essentially guilt tripped me into reading it. I sat there and devoured the book. When I finished it, several hours later, I opened it at the start and read it again. Twice. I felt so seen and validated by this book, so emotional and elated, as if things I had always felt had been articulated on the page so that I wouldn't have to struggle to explain my own beliefs and understanding of the world — I could just direct people to the book. I would have been just a week or so beyond my thirteenth birthday.
A lot of my memories are to do with beaches and oceans, such as:
The aforementioned Broulee, which I discussed in my meaningful tree entry several days ago.
Bobbing out beyond the breakers at Whale Beach for hours with my cousin and sister, loudly singing the lyrics to 'Coco Jambo' by Mr President and no doubt thoroughly infuriating everyone else in the water.
Swimming at 90 Mile Beach in Victoria with a gang of other kids who I met up with only every three years when a good friend of my mother's invited all our families to come and stay in this old hotel at Lake Tyers that she had a timeshare in. This memory is significant not for the beach itself (although I spent many happy hours there), but rather for the fact that — as we were all very strong swimmers — we had managed to swim out beyond the deep trough of water that had formed, and had made it to a sandbank way out beyond the breaking waves. However, in the trough of water, a shark was swimming around! We didn't notice it, but one of the parents watching on the beach did, and had a real struggle to convince us to all come in out of the water, but without telling us there was a shark nearby, as it would have panicked us when we needed to swim through very deep water.
Swimming in wetsuits way down at Philip Island, and absolutely terrifying the other parents who were there with my dad, because my sister and I took boogie boards out into extremely high waves and proceeded to catch them all, even though (it felt as if) we were being hurled into the air. I just didn't have fear at that age, and she always copied me. I would have been fourteen and she would have been ten.
I also have a lot of memories relating to gymnastics, which I have to say was probably the best thing I ever did throughout my childhood, because it gave me a sense of perspective. I loved gymnastics so much, and when I was a very young child I wanted to be an Olympic gymnast, but although I worked very hard at it, and trained for hours (probably at maximum somewhere between 12 to 15 hours per week), it did not love me back, and it was obvious to me by the time I was about twelve years old that there would be a point where I would hit my own physical limit, and would be unable to progress any further. Learning this lesson: that there would be things which, no matter how hard I worked at them, and how much I loved them, I would never be brilliant at, was for me a really helpful and healthy thing to happen. In any case, I learnt to do a lot of stuff before I hit that physical limit, and my gymnastics memories therefore include (I apologise about the quality of all these videos below; they were the best I could manage on Youtube):
Doing a glide kip for the first time.
Doing a long kip for the first time (although in my case there was less preliminary swinging about on the bar).
Doing giants for the first time (start at about 7.30 on the video, there's a lot of silly preamble).
Basically all my gymnastics memories are about bars, because that was my favourite apparatus. And they were a feeling of hard work paying off, of being able to do incredible things with my body, and of understanding my own body and how to control it as it flew through the air. At its best, gymnastics gave me incredible confidence, and a sense of control at an age (I did it from the ages of seven to seventeen, but I'm talking mostly about my teenage years here) when that feeling is quite rare. And, probably because I spent so many hours hurling myself around the air, wearing very little clothing, surrounded by a bunch of other teenagers doing the same, I had precisely zero body image issues throughout my entire adolescence, which was wonderful.
I could go on, but that's probably enough. I have a dreadful short-term memory, but my memories of distant childhood experiences are clear and vivid, and extensive.
montfelisky, who asked for a significant childhood memory.Me being who I am, I couldn't narrow it down to one.
A lot of my memories from childhood are about reading. For example:
A lot of my memories are to do with beaches and oceans, such as:
I also have a lot of memories relating to gymnastics, which I have to say was probably the best thing I ever did throughout my childhood, because it gave me a sense of perspective. I loved gymnastics so much, and when I was a very young child I wanted to be an Olympic gymnast, but although I worked very hard at it, and trained for hours (probably at maximum somewhere between 12 to 15 hours per week), it did not love me back, and it was obvious to me by the time I was about twelve years old that there would be a point where I would hit my own physical limit, and would be unable to progress any further. Learning this lesson: that there would be things which, no matter how hard I worked at them, and how much I loved them, I would never be brilliant at, was for me a really helpful and healthy thing to happen. In any case, I learnt to do a lot of stuff before I hit that physical limit, and my gymnastics memories therefore include (I apologise about the quality of all these videos below; they were the best I could manage on Youtube):
Basically all my gymnastics memories are about bars, because that was my favourite apparatus. And they were a feeling of hard work paying off, of being able to do incredible things with my body, and of understanding my own body and how to control it as it flew through the air. At its best, gymnastics gave me incredible confidence, and a sense of control at an age (I did it from the ages of seven to seventeen, but I'm talking mostly about my teenage years here) when that feeling is quite rare. And, probably because I spent so many hours hurling myself around the air, wearing very little clothing, surrounded by a bunch of other teenagers doing the same, I had precisely zero body image issues throughout my entire adolescence, which was wonderful.
I could go on, but that's probably enough. I have a dreadful short-term memory, but my memories of distant childhood experiences are clear and vivid, and extensive.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-15 10:04 am (UTC)One day on North Stradbroke, I decided I was going to try to swim out to the dolphins ... they swam away of course, and I got caught in a bit of a rip current, but managed to swim across it and scramble onto some rocks, and when I got back to shore, they assured me that I was being dragged into a "shark nest"!
no subject
Date: 2020-01-18 01:24 pm (UTC)Philip Island is great — the penguins are so cute! I didn't go that often, as I grew up in Canberra and it was pretty far away, but my dad had a really good friend who lived in Melbourne, and occasionally our two families went on holiday to Philip Island together.
That sounds like a memorable — if scary – experience with the dolphins and rip!