Swings

A reflection on equilibrium, and a poem

If you’re short for time, feel free to skip through to the poem at the bottom.

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I have fond memories of swings from my childhood home in Marton. We had these massive oak trees in the backyard; Dad had tied a rope to one of the high branches with a motocross tyre on the other end and made a swing out of it. I loved that swing: the cool breeze past my ears, that rhythmic, calming pace. When I felt adventurous, I would swing higher, the sense of nervous exhilaration pushing the edges of my kid nerves. But mostly, for me, swings are calming memories.

Here’s me as a little fulla in my swing. It was actually car seat that hooked over the back seat of our HQ Holden. It perhaps wasn’t the safest car seat (it was the 70s, there weren’t even seatbelts in the back), but Dad turned it into a decent kids’ swing. I love this photo – clearly, I was happy, content.

Where I now live, we’ve got a large section with big trees. My daughters have grown up here. I made a swing for them from a high limb of our sprawling honey-locust tree: a proper wooden platform with custom-welded stainless-steel brackets and high-tensile rope. Industrial. My girls loved it, sometimes just by themselves, swinging gently and feeling the breeze through their hair, sometimes with me pushing them high enough to touch the leaves and branches. Exhilarating screams.

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Calm amongst the chaos

Back in April 2022, I spent a weekend at the tranquil little Coromandel Peninsula settlement of Whiritoa. It was an opportunity for a little silence and solitude, which I’ve learnt I need every now and again.

It had been a weird couple of years. New Zealand came through the first half of COVID remarkably unscathed; by the end of 2020 we had stamped it out, and while the rest of the world was languishing, we were at the beach, at concerts, zero restrictions. We were so grateful we gladly elected our government back in with a landslide victory – a happy and compliant team of five million.

But 2021 shifted. Delta wouldn’t be stamped out so easily, and the strict measures that had helped in the beginning started to work against us. Anxiety, isolation, strain, and distrust, culminating in a month-long occupation at Parliament, with hundreds protesting how all this was playing out, before being dispersed by force in March 2022. It was a wild national swing from relief to anger.

I was reflecting on this just a month later in Whiritoa. It was strange, because those same years had been restorative for me personally. After several years in a high-strain construction management role in the rough-and-tumble of our building sector, it had taken me a couple of years to unwind. By 2022 I was discovering more natural and restorative rhythms that returned a sense of equilibrium. I knew this was a privilege, as many had found those years tough and stressful. I was holding these disparate realities in both hands – grateful for my easier season, yet aware of the societal strains around me.

Down the beach at Whiritoa, a small tidal stream flows into the Pacific Ocean, lined with pōhutukawa trees and rustic rope swings. I went and sat in one of those swings for an hour or so, just swinging gently, contemplating all this. Words came that formed a poem, trying to capture my nostalgic memories of childhood stability while acknowledging the turmoil that had been in me and was now around me. It’s not a matter of imagining all that away or just going to the beach for some navel-gazing time alone. For me it was about finding a way to stay grounded through what life throws, so I could engage in a healthier way.

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A letter to my future self

I now look back on that time, and that poem, as if somehow my inner consciousness knew I would need it someday, because tougher times were still to come.

On a Saturday in November 2023, I was pushing a four-year-old on our big swing when something sharply tweaked in my right wrist – a sudden, painful jolt.

I came inside immediately and iced it, assuming I had strained or sprained something. On Monday it was still sore, so I went to the physiotherapist. I took a week off work, but it didn’t improve. By then it was December; a mate helped me tidy up my building jobs and I took extended time off through Christmas and New Year. It would be fine by then, right?

It wasn’t.

The pain increased and spread into my fingers, up my forearm, like a slow contagion. It didn’t make sense. This was just an innocuous sprain, right? Why was it getting worse?

Six months later, I was diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome. Somehow my autonomic nervous system perceived this simple injury as a threat to my whole body, and a normal pain response became an embedded autonomic nervous system strategy wildly out of proportion to what had really occurred.

I haven’t worked since then. Still can’t. Those nourishing rhythms and practices that brought tranquillity and equilibrium four years ago don’t work anymore. My body is constantly tense, wired, on alert. Rest is hard. Sleep is unrefreshing. Relaxing is almost impossible, even though I have so much time.

It’s like I wrote that poem as a letter to my future self, reminding me that seasons swing in and out like a pendulum, that summers don’t last but neither do winters, and that through them all I’m provided for and still seen. I’m held even through this, even when it feels out of control. Everything I need is still here, and I am not alone.

That’s something I find very hard to hold on to. Yet somehow, it holds me.

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Holding on and letting go

Holding on to hope becomes something we sometimes have to force ourselves to do, even when we struggle to believe that this is not the last word. There is something deeper and stronger that holds us, a rhythm beneath our lost routines and broken practices that still carries us even when we’re lost.

There’s something magnetic that pulls us back toward that inner state of equanimity we might call home, that place where everything is in its right place, where there is calm and healing even when all the evidence points against it. That is hard to trust when it seems so far away, when it seems as though we’ve lost our way and may never find our way back to that home, that state of equilibrium, that place where everything is in its right place.

For me, to hold on to that requires, on the one hand, a bloody-minded perseverance and, on the other, a gentle letting go – stopping my manic striving and simply resting in the trust that I am held in an all-encompassing love I will never understand and yet somehow know deep in my bones. Like a distant memory of belonging and being safe in a place I struggle to remember, yet know I will return to someday.