The Freedom to Begin, and the Freedom to Quit

It’s been six months since I took my final bow on the aerial silks.

To be clear, it’s not as if I’ve said a final, permanent farewell. As long as I possess a healthy body, I might still find myself reaching for the silks—not to present a completed work to the world, but as one might write in a secret, private diary.
In LA, I still drop by a studio whenever the mood strikes. And in Japan, there are still some eccentric minds who, for some reason, want my advice on training or choreography. I find myself putting together menus and practicing alongside them in a strange, reflective state of mind.
Compared to our old relationship, which was more like the intimacy of a shared life, we’re now more like casual acquaintances. But as long as we still remain in this world, we might just cross paths again.

Looking back, I could choose to regret that I so faithfully kept my self-imposed promise that I chose to stop living with the silks.
But I’d like to believe that the value of what I managed to protect (perhaps) by keeping that promise, and the weight of that time—which is made so much denser because the exit was sealed shut—outweighs any fragile sense of regret.

—

Let's say a human lifespan is 85 years. At age 30, you have about 20,000 days remaining. At age 60, it's 9,000 days. At age 80, it's 1,800. If we imagine the value of time skyrocketing in direct proportion to its scarcity, a single day at age 80 is worth ten times more than a day at age 30, based solely on its physical rarity.

Truth be told, hearing that you have "20,000 days left" doesn't exactly spark a sense of gratitude. But hearing that you have "1,800 days" suddenly makes the end feel imminent.
(And considering that 1,800 is only an average—that in reality, you are forced to roll a die every day without knowing when it might hit a fatal number—you can truly begin to feel the crushing weight of a single day at age 80.)

Furthermore, as the end draws closer by the second, the value of your remaining time doesn't just increase several or dozens of times over; it begins to grow exponentially. And on your final day alive, the value of each remaining moment approaches infinity as the moment of death nears.

Every day, we consume a microscopic grain of time to fill an immense vessel. But perhaps you realize the value of that seemingly insignificant grain only when the finite vessel is already nearly full. Since life is finite after all, I really shouldn't have any time at all to begin with. (Though, of course, if you dwelt on that constantly, you'd never manage a normal social life...)

—

In my case, because I had decided that my aerial lifespan would be one single year for various reasons, as the end approached, the value of those remaining hours of contact felt cold and heavy, like a massive black hole.

This one right now is the last lesson in my life facing this coach. It will never come again.
This is the last time I will untie these specific silks in this studio; the last time I will close this heavy door.
This is the very last grain of performing before an audience in my life; I am using it up right now.

Because I felt that weight so acutely, I was able to strive—so that even if my aerial life ended there, I could think to myself: It’s okay. It was a good life.
The value of the final performance, in particular, was infinite. Yet that value was so great that the resulting pressure caused me to falter completely. In the end, sports are a mental game. Even if you practice in units of a hundred, the rehearsal and the real thing are worlds apart.

—

And besides, just as I had to break free from an old curse to fall under the spell of the aerial silks, the freedom to begin something new always goes hand in hand with the freedom to quit what you are doing now.
Even with something that represents years of your dedication, unless you grant yourself the light-hearted freedom to walk away at any moment, you can never truly fall under the power of a genuine, new curse.

—

Now that I have returned to the ground and am living a mundane life, the secret dialogue with gravity while spinning and dropping, the sensation of floating earned in exchange for the pain of the silks biting into my flesh, and that razor-sharp consciousness—all of it seems to dissolve silently into the daily routine.
However, the "me" before that one year of aerial and the "me" after are two different people. Even now, though we no longer spend our days together, that year continues to leave its mark within my ever-changing self.

May your life ahead be filled with many new beginnings, and perhaps the necessary endings that accompany them. May you feel the infinite value of each microscopic grain of time, and may you encounter countless joys and beautiful things, enough to overflow your finite vessel.