Worthiness

A reflection on risking life and limb for a worthy though brief experience.

You can view the safety talk in full here: https://youtu.be/flXPVLRr2gE

One challenge with parkour is that we are so in control of our decisions. There is no other player, no moving ball. Yes the environment can fail but if we’ve done our homework then it is us measuring ourselves, as a practice, against our perception of ourselves.

This is a challenge because it can teach us that there really is no where outside of ourselves to point the blame, and when it comes to dire consequence, it can be much harder to say an accident happened. Maybe it was a miscalculation, a lapse of judgment, a fail to adequately prepare. It can be a gift to truly believe something was out of your control.

Most injuries in parkour are to the lower extremities within the first two years of training.

It’s a terrible thing to say that it can be very hard to learn physical humility without some scrapes and bruises. I don’t like the idea that we must get hurt to learn, and yet I’ve noticed recently I am more afraid for someone when I watch someone excel without ever having had an injury.

I would never wish harm and it feels cruel to honor pain as a “good” teacher. At the same time as the jumps and the consequences get bigger there is a sense that I would like someone’s first bad bail to happen sooner rather than later. This is the hardest line of thought to reconcile - and it’s far from that for me. Along with having low injury rates, we are teaching people how to fall without getting hurt, how can we learn how to fall and recover like the wild animals that we are? In that way the lesson I must teach feels at odds with the lesson that we all must learn - something about not being made of glass, but also not being made of stone. We are resilient through and vulnerable to our practice.

So my first nit is that I know very few people who have gotten seriously hurt - but I do know two who’ve died as a result of their practice - it might happen to be the only two in the states since the emergence of parkour. If that’s not true I don’t know if any others. Even for death I don’t know where we compare exactly to lacrosse or football - both topping 1/100,000/year.

I’m also hung up because a team member was actually not pleased that I called the meeting without discussing it with them first. I brought it up to them but they took it as unilateral - so in that sense I’m running the simulation on what happened and trying to figure that out. I have only otherwise received positive feedback from attendees, friends, and team members.

We had a life-threatening injury on the roof at the event - it felt necessary to me to address it - it felt negligent to ignore it or sweep it under the rug. At the same time I knew that telling this group of people. to do something different in their training is probably something close to a cardinal sin.

So I reflected on what kept me and keeps me safe, and I did my best to speak directly from my experience on it.

I was and am also struck by just how close we were to having a light go out at this event. Remembering the night before how upset I got, how uncontrollable it all felt, and how people telling me it was all right, she was alright, it was not my fault, there was nothing I could do except exactly what I did how I did when I did. Those words were meant to calm and support me yet in the end they left me feeling unsupported and afraid.

Maybe it was hearing that the friend I had lost would be alright and they weren’t.

Maybe it was that I felt alone in my pursuit of some meaningful actionable change in the face of something I didn’t understand but on some level I must have accepted as a possibility. At the very least I became deeply jealous of anyone with a job that didn’t put people into such a risky place.

I am wrestling with the idea of radical responsibility - can we become and feel responsible for the whole world?

Well maybe there’s nothing that I could do physically different. Maybe I have also to respect that athlete’s autonomy and decision, even if I can in the same breath, wonder why it is we do this thing.

Even if there is nothing we can do, and certainly to change the past,

If it can happen, and we can’t know when, then really all that’s left for us to do is love.