Geography and Gymnastics

Last night (it really was about 4pm but it was very dark out) I found myself stopping by a window in downtown Trondheim to watch the kids inside run around doing gymnastics. They played in the foam pits, did flips on the mats, swung from the uneven bars. I found myself smiling and remembering this phase in my own childhood. In Cultural Geography class I wrote a journal entry about these memories, which I reread and have decided to share. Maybe it's cheating to recycle my writing, but I'll call it a bonus post instead.

 February 23, 2014 - Stretching

"Can you have a memory without a place? This question was asked in passing in class about a week ago, and ever since it has been haunting my mind. Nearly every conversation I’ve had of late has included the phrase “this reminds me of...” or “it’s just like this one time at...”. The notion of a memory separate from a place appeals to me because memories can be triggered by scents and sounds and often feel like they contain only emotions. I have found, though, that every memory I believe to be independent of location comes back to a specific spot. The picture of my grandfather is set in the living room of a house in central Idaho. The scent of woodsmoke goes to the cabin in northern Wisconsin. The chilling cold at sunrise is associated with an overpass in southern Minnesota. The song “Peaceful Easy Feeling” places me on a highway in Utah.

Today I think I found peace with this notion that place and memory are inseparable with an unexpected trip down memory lane. I was at capoeira practice in the CFA, and about five of us had just finished warming up and were stretching. As I sat on my knees and placed the back of my hands on the hard floor, leaning back to stretch my wrists in preparation for acrobatic work, I traveled back to my childhood. When I was about eight years old I was interested in gymnastics. Fundamentally, this was a passing phase in my childhood. I quit as soon as I got scared of doing back handsprings. But for a few years I spent several evenings a week at Ricochets Gym. We entered through a back hallway connected to a furniture store. The floor was covered by blue mats and pits of foam blocks. The air was always dry and smelled like chalk. It was cold in the hallway and warm in the gym. We jumped on the trampoline, flipped on the bars, fell off of the beams, and occasionally (but only if we had been good) we could jump into the foam pits and throw blocks at each other. And one of the first things we did every class was to line up and stretch. With a special focus on the wrists in preparation for doing handstands and cartwheels. We sat on our knees on the squishy blue mats, still cold in our sparkly leotards, and placed the backs of our hands on the ground, and leaned back watching the graceful older girls on the balance beams.

After gymnastics I found a longer lasting interest in skiing and running, and it was not until college that I returned to doing cartwheels on a regular basis. But no matter the situation, when I lean back to stretch my wrists I find myself as an energetic eight year old sitting in Ricochets Gym, complete with the dry air and scent of chalk. A memory doesn’t exist without a place. Every action we take is stored in our memory as an entry tagged by place. In computer science, we would say that human memory is a map from events to lists of places. This provides order and a way to relate different memories. Today, when I found myself in a memory many years and miles away, I followed it to the next place. I wandered through the many locations that could be associated with this action. I ran cross-country in Minnesota, I removed logs from trails in Idaho, I went rock-climbing in Arizona, and I finally found myself back on a hard, cold floor in Middlebury, Vermont, on my fifth day of college listening to a senior explain how to stretch your wrists properly so you don’t hurt them doing handstands. I’ve spent about as long playing capoeira as I did doing gymnastics. There are miles and years separating my current self from my eight-year-old memories. Yet a single action connects them all. So today, I stood up and and added another cartwheel to the list.

It's been awhile since I wrote this, and there have been many more cartwheels to add to the list, in a number of different countries. On beaches and mountains and down the hallways at school. Maybe today will have another.