Unbroken

As the name suggests, this is a demanding task, at times leviathan, requiring as indomitable a spirit as an indomitable body. When one or neither of these prove up to the task, the challenge parries the strain back onto its challenger. A broken athlete, like a broken challenge, is said to be defeated.

Consider a leap across a gap of some 15 feet. 4.75 meters. The task, even for a seasoned athlete, might require time to process its demand, and considerable effort and energy for its execution — especially if the surfaces are unstable or slippery, or the weather imposing with gusts of wind. Even then, once the leap is broken, it is common practice for the athlete to seek to re-invent the challenge into something greater. To seek to make the jump plyometrically instead of from a running start. To confront it in the rain. To meet it in years’ time. To defeat it still with the gradual pains and aches of age and degradation. To meet it in times of great distress, after the ending of a marriage, after the passing of a loved one.

This leap will be broken again. It will die, and be remolded once more. To be broken is a form of death. And make no mistake, all things will be broken. All leaps will be crossed. You, and I, will be broken. You and I, perhaps tomorrow or in decades time, will cease to be. We will die. These challenges of our own invention will cease, the mosaic of our lives dissolved to dust, all things unbroken eventually broken. Here lies both the assurance and the paranoia, to be burdened by the knowledge that this great challenge — this lifetime of immense and unrewarded hardship — will in one way or another fall to pieces; to know that any strength we have will one day be tested, beaten to its knees, taken beyond what is bearable, and — like boiling water taken to frozen glass — at its most critical moment be shattered.

And the question that is left, for anyone who has stopped to watch the athlete at the precipice of the leap, and for the athlete themself in that most mortal, vulnerable moment — is this: why? Why meet these trials of our own invention? Why have grace? Why bother with dignity? What of culture and myth and courage in the face of the absurdity of our own suffering and mortality? Why strive to be unbroken, when all is inevitably broken? 

A parkour practitioner shares the same lexicon of movement as any dancer, martial artist, athlete or locomotor. This vocabulary of acrobatics, though common, when arranged by the practitioner in their own manner — employing their variety of syntax, arrangement, and meter (just as any writer or poet might find their own elegy within the confines of a shared language) — will discover that they are capable of profound curiosity, that these reservoirs of yearning and compassion rhyme with those of others. Though the spoken or written word might not always be up to the task of bridging that often vast chasm between self and other, perhaps the difference might be made up with locomotion.

The discipline of parkour finds its roots in the methods of indigenous peoples, for whom adept movement was essential to everyday life, and its value was assessed according to its utility and application. This utilitarian and martial character, while not as emphasized in many of the communities that practice parkour today, is still at the root of its expression. What many consider to be a well-performed line or combination of movements is deemed so by its perceived efficiency, urgency, and economy of motion — where utility and aesthetics find themselves in inextricable marriage. This is where the distinction is arguably made between play and training, though the parkour practitioner will regularly describe their practice in terms of the latter.

Although this is ultimately semantics, I think that the acceptance of the term “training” to describe our practice is important because it suggests a fundamental object of attention: a concrete goal, a circumstance to be prepared for, or — if only taken in an abstract sense — an ideal to aspire towards. The French expression “être et durer,” or “to be and to last,” encourages attention to the ephemeral present, as well as an awareness of the physical and mental demands that must be met for the athlete that is aiming towards longevity. In short, to be aware of both the present and our inevitable end.

The word ‘human’ comes from the Latin word humando, which translates to “burying” or “to be buried.” To be human is to be forgotten, to eventually become food for the worms and fertilizer for the trees. We write our stories on pages that can be torn or burned or soaked through, expose images on negatives that will one day be blotched out by dirt and moisture, transcribe films onto hard drives that will fail, share videos on an internet that will collapse with its servers, and so on and so forth until even the very Earth falls at the mercy of a burning sun. Memory and beauty exist in the beholder, and so too they perish with the beholder. To know that the walls we move on will be ash is part of the dance — the chorus beautiful because of the silence that bookends it. I think of the ancient Greek concept of eudaimonia, which contested that a good life could only be deemed so when reflected on at its terminus. 

Here we have our contradiction: a movement cannot be said to have unbroken flow until it ends, a cantos made impossible to rhyme until it ceases, and a spirit cannot be said to have been unbroken until it itself is broken.