The Swing

There is a poem by Victoria Hutchins that begins with the memory of a child on a swing:

Do you remember the first time you pumped your legs for dear life, and jumped? … How, for that one airborne second, nothing else mattered? When was the last time you were alone with your heartbeat and the sky?And when did you forget how to let go?

What stays with me about this poem is not simply the nostalgia of it, but the way it feels bodily. It brings back a kind of memory that is less about story and more about sensation: the swing, the momentum, the momentary suspension where effort and surrender become almost indistinguishable. That brief instant between holding on and letting go. Between control and release. Between what is familiar and whatever comes next.

Then the poem turns quietly into a more difficult question: When did you forget how to let go? There is something striking in the suggestion that letting go was once instinctive. As children, there is no philosophy of release. There is only movement. Trust exists in the body before it becomes an idea we analyze or try to practice correctly.

Over time, though, something changes. We begin to hold on more tightly... to plans, identities, expectations, certainty, control. Even to our ideas about who we are supposed to be. What was once simple becomes layered with self-consciousness and habit.

In yogic philosophy, there is a term that speaks directly to this: aparigraha, often translated as non-grasping or non-attachment. More precisely, it points to the ways we continue holding when holding is no longer necessary. The subtle tightening around experience, outcomes, or identity. Not only externally, but internally.

There is a familiar metaphor often used for this: the trapeze artist suspended between bars. In order for movement to continue, the grip must open completely. There is no partial letting go that works. The next hold only becomes possible through release.

What both the poem and this image recognize is the aliveness of that suspended moment - risk, trust, uncertainty, and presence all existing together in the same breath. Not certainty or control, but contact with the unknown without collapsing into it.

In everyday life, this shows up in small, ordinary ways: how tightly we hold our plans, how quickly we try to resolve discomfort, how much effort we add when things feel uncertain or unstable. Sometimes gripping looks like trying harder. Sometimes it looks like withdrawing. Sometimes it becomes so familiar we barely notice it until something asks us to soften.

But aparigraha is not asking us to stop caring or detach from life. Instead, it asks us to notice where holding has become habitual rather than necessary. Where effort has replaced presence. Where control has replaced responsiveness.

And beneath all of this, the poem suggests that perhaps letting go is not an unfamiliar skill we need to acquire, but is, instead, something remembered. Something the body already knows. The swing does not require instruction in release. It only requires trust in the arc that follows.

So much of practice — on the mat and elsewhere — becomes this kind of noticing: Where are we gripping more than we need to? And what might happen if, even briefly, we softened that grip without losing steadiness?

There is one line from the poem that continues to stay with me: When was the last time you were alone with your heartbeat and the sky?

I love it because I hear it as an invitation. It may feel so silly and simple but it makes me want to go outside and place one hand over my heart as I turn my gaze to the sky. Even for just a few moments, to reconnect in that way.