July 14, 2010

• Falling

  Falling is something we learn to do wrong. At least, that’s how my hapkido instructor told me. Pretty much, we learn when we are very young to fall rolling and distributing energy outward. When social awareness comes into play, we learn at a young age that people laugh at us and it is not appropriate to fall, so we put our body in poor conditions to take the fall — like putting down a hand, sometimes breaking the wrist or forearm, due to all the weight and pressure exerted in one small area on our body. Bracing yourself can actually make things worse; you want to be loose, so your body can distribute the force naturally, instead of straining muscles or joints as they are tense and lock.

  Falling is something people, however radical and dangerous it may be, like to embrace: falling out of a plane, falling off a bridge with a bungee, falling off a 2-3 story building in le parkour, etc. How strange! They make it an art or a science, whatever you want to call it, to fall well. That is, to do it safely and not get hurt.

  Falling is a strange phenomena. If you’re in a plane going down, you experience zero gravity. You don’t feel like you’re falling, per se: you’re in a chamber of air, so there is no wind rushing, there’s no objects around you zipping past you. Your frame of reference is confused, disoriented. Of course, you don’t want to get into this situation unless the plane can start flying again.

  When two objects fall, all other things eliminated, they fall at the same rate. E.g. a feather and a bowling ball fall at the same rate of acceleration in a vacuum. When they fall together, to view the other, if it were possible, would be as if the other were still. Without one moving faster than the other, they don’t drift apart, if they are headed in the same direction. They appear to be normal, without a frame of reference — some other object to tell how fast they are going. (this was actually Berkeley’s point about motion being relative to us, a charge against Newtonian physics with “absolute space”)

  But falling in love is something entirely different though. ….Isn’t it?

  Maybe not.

  • 12:08 am
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