Gravitron

A couple of summers ago Luke talked me into going on an amusement park ride that I had otherwise successfully avoided for my entire life. We were at Funland in Rehobeth Beach, Delaware. He went on the ride first with his older brother and thought it was so great he came to drag me on for another round.

I dutifully got in line because, what else are you supposed to do when your 10-year-old desperately wants you go on a ride with him? But inwardly, I thought, “Oh shit.”

Let me just say, there’s nothing about the Gravitron that appeals to me. If you don’t recognize the name, you’ve definitely seen the ride. It’s an ubiquitous carnival ride. A round, flying saucer kind of thing. Inside, it’s like being inside a drum. You’re instructed to lean against the wall. Then neon lights flicker on in short order, the door slides closed, and you spin….so fast, and so hard that you’re pinned, powerless, against your allotted space on the wall and the floor drops out beneath you.

I’m not sure if it was the prospect of the spinning that freaked me out or being rendered powerless and immobile. As we spun, I had a vague memory of a movie in which someone throws up spectacularly on someone on this ride.

Well, spoiler alert: I survived (without puking). Other spoiler alert: Luke has now moved on to big rollercoasters, so it’s not like I’m off the hook. (I think The Hulk is in my future. Pray for me, and for strong seatbelts.)

Anyway, I was reminded of the Gravitron recently, when contemplating the hard, unavoidable crap in life that you can’t avoid, the kind of stuff I alluded to in my last post. Illness, mortality, you know the drill. The kind of things that you can’t change and, you just know, with a deep sense of foreboding, that you’re going to have to face. No outs. It’s just going to unfold in front of you, and you’re pinned, enduring it, searching your psychic pockets for whatever strength you’ve got to get through it.

Until that moment, I had happily relegated my 60 seconds on the Gravitron to a distant never-doing-that-again memory. But what I thought recently was, wow, this feels like being pinned helplessly to a wall again.

To be honest I don’t know where I’m going with this. Except, maybe, to give voice to the discomfort that is dealing with awful things and having no choice in the matter. Here’s to acknowledging that sometimes the universe really doles it out.

I find myself listening to endless self-help podcasts these days, buying new journals, grasping at any tools to cope with the storm of it all. Because that’s my learned M.O. for survival. Growth, despite it and because of it. I’m proud of it, honestly, but it doesn’t mean I like it.

But, if I’m going to stick with Gravitron comparison, maybe it does suggest the tiniest bit of ability to move—even if it’s just a finger, or a foot—while the world does its spinning.