Stumbling whilst staying stable during a Transition
Words & Photo : Abigail Fox
Video: Dancers, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Ewan Murray-Will
I’m drawn to moving image for its hypnotic effect. I was particularly drawn to these members of the Ballet Russes when wandering around the Art Gallery of NSW because of their little stumble. As they danced during their downtime on the northern beaches in Sydney in 1937, filmed by dermatologist and amateur filmmaker Ewan Murray-Will, their transitions weren’t always perfectly smooth but they continued elegantly with their sequence.
Transitions can feel like a stumble. The constant motion of life sometimes leaves me feeling queasy, just like when I get motion sickness whilst in a car but at least with car sickness the solution is obvious. With life transitions the solution isn’t always obvious and it takes patience and a serious amount of courage to sit with the discomfort that may arise. When the dancers stumble they have a smile on their face and continue to move on to the
next part of the sequence. One idea in existentialism that sparked my interest, and that I have learnt from but also wrested with, is that we have no fixed essence. We are always in the process of becoming and life is fluid. Jean-Paul Sartre said ‘existence precedes essence’. Rather than inheriting a predetermined essence, we shape our own identity and values through our choices and actions. It is through those choices and actions that we become who we are.
During moments of transition, I often romanticised about the idea of having a fixed essence or self. The possibility that there might have been something fixed inside me offered me comfort and became a distraction from the uncomfortable emotions that arose with uncertainty as I searched to find it. At first the idea that we are fluid and constantly becoming left me feeling destabilised. How was I meant to keep my feet on the ground if I had no fixed self to grasp onto? But in reality it kept me stuck in old ways of being that meant I wasn’t fully able to embrace the change and see above the horizon.
I wondered if there was a combination of the two but I think the answer lies somewhere in developing a level of security in my evolving self to be able to tolerate and handle what life throws at me. A security that keeps me stable in an unstable world, where I can face transitions and not be swallowed by the change.The dancers reminded me of this, the stumble isn’t big, it’s actually rather discreet but they have practiced enough to know the sequence, trust and keep moving through it without becoming destabilised.
My next major life transition, becoming a mother, has already started with the change in my body. Transition for me hasn’t always felt like it has a positive association, but I believe this to be one of the few times where I have wholly embraced the experience whilst being able to remember the temporal nature of the more challenging periods of physical and emotional discomfort.
During transitions, I find people come with an array of advice and opinions, sounding very loud, and can at times contribute to destabilisation. All of which is well intended. Some of it is incredibly comforting, while at other times it can feel like a disruption or taint on my own processing of what is happening, as I hear somebody’s declaration of what absolutely will happen to me because of their own subjective experience. It has been absolutely no exception since becoming pregnant and I have felt it so acutely.
As I think about transitioning into motherhood, I often wonder how stable that sense of security will feel when my identity, what I thought I knew and what I thought was important to me is in a state of flux, alongside lack of sleep and fluctuating hormones.
If transition requires a degree of internal stability to navigate it without becoming entirely absorbed by the external noise around me, what happens when the transition itself begins to unsettle the very things I have relied upon to feel stable?
Perhaps this is where consistency becomes important. Not consistency in the sense where I remained unchanged, such as a grasping onto a believed essential self, but in having something to return to. Like the dancers repeatedly returning to their sequence, there may be a sense of returning to an internal point of reference. From there, other people’s experiences and expectations can be heard without necessarily becoming my own. Stability then is not remaining the same but developing the capacity to trust myself even when I don’t know yet who I am becoming in the face of a transition.
Words & Photo : Abigail Fox
Video: Dancers, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Ewan Murray-Will