It’s below zero, though the sun is sharp and insistent. The boys drag their sleds like sharp green razors slicing the icy snow behind them as they trudge up the hill in our backyard again and again.
Soon only one is left. The other is zigzagging toward the house, humped over but smiling, cold as he has ever been. Done.
The older one heads up again. He has abandoned his sled for a boogie board and proceeds to “surf” down the hill. He makes it upright and to the bottom almost every time.
What comes next does not scare me.
I see him fall wildly and then lie perfectly still in the snow. The deep black of his coat is dull and dark. It draws my eye, as does he, inside it prone and motionless. His utter stillness is so charged with tension and count-down, and so familiar, that I know he’s not hurt. I can practically feel him holding himself stalk-still.
I know this tension because I played it out myself in water, in childhood. Surely you’ve done it too. You find yourself alone in a pool; the quiet snares you. No sounds but the slight bump of the filter basket, the drops of water falling from your chin, your ears, your elbows.
You breathe in hard, curl like a fist, legs up and tight against your chest and tip your head underwater — let loose every muscle in your arms, thighs, and neck. You feel your back break the water’s surface and bob up. Your hair splays and spreads like reeds. You hear blood pumping.
Such moments are filled with a jump-out- of-your-skin anticipation, a hitch before movement. When I saw my son splayed and still on the snow, I knew from some far away part of my own memory that he was holding, holding, holding and not hurt.
I asked him later — what were you doing so still like that? His answer: “Feeling what it is like to be about to move.”
Being about to move means you are frozen for some turn of the clock, however partial or incomplete: tick tock, motionless. Tick tock, motionless. It is a moment so stuffed with contradiction that it makes us twitch.
What children do next is burst finally forward, out of the water, or up from the snow in a flare of zip and scramble. They break the still and marvel at it only the next time they enter it . . . I’m here again, shhhhhhh.
But what of us? What happens when we are caught in the exquisite, itchy, powerful tension before movement — and it’s not in snow or water, but in a pool of indecision? What happens when we don’t know what might, will, should happen next? What happens if — in this culture of life coaches, wired calendars and 10-steps-to- anything — we find ourselves simply holding in the space before movement with no idea what we are doing next?
We know the frustration of being there, the anticipation, the finger- drumming impatience, but do we remember the value?
If we are about to move, it looks like we are stuck, immobile, pillared, but we are keenly aware in our stillness, sifting for data, absorbing to come eventually to what we need.
It is hard to not know exactly what’s coming next, or how to fix it, or what we must do.
But maybe if we spent more time splayed at the bottom of the icy hill, feeling the pause before movement, if we spent more time in a free-floating curl, feeling the silence of caught breath, if we spent more time about to move, we’d get where we are going faster.
Sometimes rushing movement only strips us and tires us and empties us, which is not to say that being about to move is any less taxing. As my son said, “I stayed still until I just couldn’t stand it anymore.”
It’s OK not to know your next move. Hang back into the moments of being about to move. When the right time comes, you will know. And the certainty you feel will be from the stillness that came before.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
