High Wire Lifestyle

Like a lemming nearing a cliff’s edge, I’m racing toward graduation.

Or maybe the lemming simile doesn’t hold up—maybe I’m more like a performer on a high wire, desperately stepping toward the other platform while juggling five plates and seven flaming torches.

My life feels like a loosely-organised collection of objects, all of which must be kept from crashing into the ground or each other, and none of which is ever at rest. My laptop always has half a dozen windows, tabs, and sticky notes open to half-finished projects, and my mind is a scramble of approaching deadlines, to-be-read titles, and chemistry terms I still don’t quite understand and probably will guess on when the exam comes around.

And at the end of all that, at some point after the nightmare chem exam and the squeaked-under deadlines and the last pages of books that consume my soul for hours at a time—graduation looms.

Yes, let’s call all of this a high wire act.

Graduation looms like the platform at the other end of the wire, solid and safe, but also small. There will be room for me to turn around, to abandon my torches and my plates, to smile, to bow, to feel something stable beneath my feet—but it will last only a moment. The platform of graduation is just big enough to make me feel safe for a few breaths, but I cannot live there. Somehow I will have to make my way from graduation to solid ground.

And somehow, I feel certain that when I climb down that ladder, I won’t find a wide expanse of ground to rest on, but yet another platform and yet another wire.

Perhaps I’ll be juggling differently on that next tightrope—instead of plates and torches, maybe bowls and batons. Instead of papers, exams, and packing lists, maybe lesson plans, foreign noun cases, and new street names will swirl through my mind. But I’ll still be on a high wire, still moving to keep from falling, still with my eye on that next platform and the momentary solid safety beneath me before the next ladder and the next wire.

See, the thing about a high wire is that you can’t sit still. You can’t relax. You can’t decide that balancing no longer matters or that you’re going to spend the rest of your life hovering on the wire between one platform and the next—and yet, in the end, that’s where we live, I think. We like to think we spend our time on the platforms, where we can let down our guard, set aside the props, and rest. But if we land on those solid boards, it’s only once in a while, only long enough to catch our breath.

Life, I think, is lived on the wires between platforms. It’s lived in the struggle to stay upright and the wild flailing to keep all the balls and plates and what-have-you in the air. It’s lived in the gasps when we think we’ll fall and the ecstasy when we think we’re flying. It’s lived in that first moment when we leave the platform and feel the empty air beneath us, and it’s lived in those last moments when we wonder whether we’ll tip to our deaths before we reach respite.

Life, I think, is lived in motion.

So here I am, running toward the graduation platform, eager for the brief rest, ready to let the plates and torches drop, ready to relax on solid ground even for a moment. But also, here I am, running toward the next wire—and I’m eager for that, too.