Unexpected Spillovers

---

Every girl aught to walk a tightrope. It is a fine, healthy exercise. It develops a rare set of muscles and self-confidence and teaches one how to walk properly on the street.
~Bird Millman

---

While I haven’t actually seen a noticeable improvement in my skill for walking properly on streets specifically (sorry Bird Millman), my balance training has had many other positive effects. Not too surprisingly, I can balance on one foot while I tie my other shoe better than I could before. Other effects have been…unexpected, seemingly random, and even humorously odd. Since I thoroughly appreciate these less obvious benefits I’ve kept a running list for my own amusement. Today I’d like to share some notable items—the unexpected “spillovers”—that have made the list:

1. Bird Milliman, who I quoted above, was right: it really does develop a good set of muscles. For me all the swaying (and flailing) from side to side improved my waistline, and I had no idea how ripped my lower back muscles could be until I started rope walking. I got a few odd looks when I (proudly) invited friends—but only close friends and family members—to poke those rock solid low back muscles.
    
2. My skills as a photographer have improved—from my understanding of negative space, to skillful use of the time-delay features when no photographer is available.
    
3. I’ve learned to breathe. I know I don’t breathe well when I’m stressed. Rubbing shoulders with highliners, my brain finally embraced deep breathing. I could hear the rhythmic huffing of highliners from yards away. Now I catch myself doing a quiet version of that breathing when I have something stressful to do, even when it’s only mental work.
    
4. I’ve made quite a few friends. For a formerly shy and still relatively introverted person, one who generally trains solo no less, that came as a pleasant surprise. Some friends I connect with because they are fellow enthusiasts, with others…well, perhaps the joy and fulfillment I find in balancing helps me connect. I also have a catchy, unique conversation starter.
    

5. All that foot flexing, balancing, and landing has toned up my toes, strengthened my arches, and padded my soles. Standing or walking barefoot is more comfortable now. …and I have a confession: I actually think my feet are more attractive. Weird, but true.
    
6. I became a blogger. That certainly wasn’t something I expected to do when I took up slacklining to help preserve my sanity during graduate school still dreaming of being published in an academic journal. I’m still writing.
    
7. As a fairly awkward teen who dreaded PE, I never would have considered myself athletic. Fast forward to the present and I am chomping at the bit to launch myself into additional circus disciplines and cross-training sports: cyr wheel, walking globe, aerial silks, yoga, ballet, etc.
    
8. I’m a better driver. Balancing has taught me to recognize tension and loss of focus and to tap into a feeling of relaxed, concentrated control. When confronted with serious freeway traffic, I recognize when I’m tensing up, I lean back in my seat, relax my grip on the wheel and keep my eyes alert.
    
9. My protractor resurfaced from the far back of my desk for the first time since high school geometry so I could draw some basic physics diagrams as part of my personal research into the physics and biomechanics of tightwire balancing.
    

10. I’ve so warped the minds of my friends by my constant babbling about balance stuff that they recognize the names of famous tightrope walkers, know and explain the difference between slacklines and tightropes, and hardly blink when I use the words funambulist and equilibrist in casual conversation. I’m very proud of my influence. The unexpected bonus is that those friends assist my research now, for instance by passing on quotes and facts from places I wouldn’t have even known to look and forwarding videos. I think I will call them my research minions. 

There are a dozen more I could mention, but that is a decent sample. While this list is an eclectic and quirky collection, I am genuinely grateful for how rope walking has spilled over into other areas of my life.

As always there is more beyond the humorous to be learned from my list. Our passions can have an incredible impact in our lives in both expected and unexpected ways, permeating and enriching them on so many levels. That is certainly true for me with balancing.

Posture and Passions

---

On the wire, the best walkers have an invisible line that extends the spine up into the sky and down into the earth. Their posture is beyond straight, almost a miracle.” ~Gwenda Bond, from Girl on a Wire 

---

Writing about a favorite storybook two months ago brought my inner bibliophile—or perhaps more accurately inner bibliovore—to the surface in full strength, and I found myself checking the offerings on Amazon. Not too long ago, in my post A Hobby Hijacked, I griped about how most books with tightwire or highwire in the title aren’t about funambulism at all. Perhaps the little elves running the Amazon search machine read my blog and thoughtfully refined the search results—because much to my surprise and delight, I hit upon not one but four books I had never seen before. Then as another bonus, Amazon emailed me when a newly released novel—Girl on a Wire—was free for a limited time on Kindle. Good job, little elves.

I’m still working my way slowly through the non-fiction acquisitions. The novel though I devoured in two days—I absolutely loved Girl on a Wire. How could I not when the main character’s hero is Bird Millman? I loved the book, but since I posted so recently about a book and I don’t want to get in too deep of a literary rut, I’ll compromise: I highly recommend the Girl on a Wire, it’s worth purchasing or borrowing in my opinion. For this post however I’ll focus on the quote and concept from the book I began this post with:

“On the wire, the best walkers have an invisible line that extends the spine up into the sky and down into the earth. Their posture is beyond straight, almost a miracle.” 

I began discovering that line myself when I first started slacklining. My local climbing gym had a slackline off in one corner, and I kept going back to it even though I wasn’t very good—at all. One of my very first “aha” moments came when I started envisioning my weight pressing straight down into the soles of my feet and onto the line. I was still atrocious, but for nanoseconds at least I could feel my body balancing instead of flailing.

It wasn’t until quite a bit later, when I stumbled across the Tight Wire and Slack Rope Training Manual produced by the European Federation of Professional Circus Schools, that I learned the appropriate straight back posture. There I was taught to tighten my core and reduce the curve of my lower back. I learned to match my posture to the line of my weigh that I had imagined earlier.

Source: Mackay Entertainment:
January Performer Spotlight - Jade Kindar Martin - Sky Walker

Duncan Wall, in his book An Ordinary Acrobat, (though technically describing handstand position specifically) describes the carefully straight posture of an acrobat and the reason for it:

“It looks like a tower of muscles, or as another instructor of mine said, ‘a human bar.’… By bolting your body over a single point, you eliminate all the ‘searching’ for balance, all the tips and sways.”

Finding and maintaining that bar in myself is a large part of my focus in training. In workouts I focus on strengthening my core in every direction. In balancing I try to use my arms and my legs rather than breaking form by bending and twisting at the waist. I actually felt pleased rather than dismayed when a chiropractor told me that my back was a little too straight.

For all my training and awareness of the importance of posture, that straight line I envisioned didn’t extend a millimeter beyond myself. It started at the tip of my head and ended where my feet pressed into the line. Perhaps it sounds silly, but there was something marvelously, mind-blowingly enlightening reading Girl on Wire and projecting that line far beyond my own physical limits.

With the magnificent image provided in the book, I began thinking about the reasons behind an acrobat’s posture. When I find that straight line posture, that pillar of strength, gravity’s relentless tug only pulls me securely into the safety of my narrow wire. Security and stability come from aligning myself with the unseen force of earth’s gravity.

It’s a strong force, that thread of gravity that reaches up from the core of the earth to grasp and pull us down. Maybe you wish you could fly away, break the chain. That is understandable, but there is security in being rooted, and it provides a foundation that enables greater things. We climb mountains by planting each foot firmly onto the earth; men cross chasms by harnessing gravity to keep them firmly on their slender strands of wire.

When I thought about that invisible line and what it represents for me in my life, what came to mind was a scene from the movie Rise of the Guardians where North talks to Jack about finding his “center.” For North it was wonder, for Jack it was fun. What things seemed to be at the core of who you are? What tugs at your heart? For me, as you all know, it’s balance. Remember, the highwire artist’s straight posture—that precise and almost miraculous alignment—keeps his center (of gravity) steady so that gravity pulls him securely down onto the wire allowing him to progress along his precarious and exacting path. When we align our lives with our centers, our passions, the forces of life will pull us to security and even enable us to reach our goals rather than toppling us over.

What we can create with our lives aligned with our our centers—the truest passions of our hearts—extends beyond our physical limitations. The lines of our lives point up into the vastness of amazing possibilities.