A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen

must know you'll make it, enough that all consciousness of self vanishes.
    After I'd been jumping a couple of years, I noticed a seeming contradiction in my coach's behavior. He routinely yelled at distance runners, and I'd seen him as a football coach slam his clipboard to the ground, but with me he was nothing but gentle, never once raising his voice. I asked why; not that I wanted the other, but simply because I was curious.
    "Everyone knows that if you yell at a high jumper he'll just start crying, and then he can't do anything."
    He was right. Had he yelled at me, I would have become self-conscious.
    The blurring of boundaries between self and other in high jumping probably provides a key to my early love for the sport, a bridge between the walls I erected to protect me from emotions raised by my father's abuse and the dismantling of those walls years later. In both cases—abuse and high jumping—those boundaries disappeared. As a child, they disappeared because I was of necessity hyperaware, always alert to sounds, sudden move ments, the slightest change in musculature or vibes that might indicate the possibility of an attack, that might give me an additional half-second to prepare for my father's violence by psychically absenting myself. Instead of remaining present to my own experience, I was present to my anticipation of his experience. My own self—whatever that means—was silent and submerged.
    When I jumped, those boundaries between self and other once again became obscure. This time, though, the blurring was accomplished not by hiding the self, but expanding it. On the best jumps, those where I approached that ragged edge of control where instinct and euphoria set me free from time and consciousness, the self grew and dissolved until there was no meaningful separation between me and the rest of the world. The bar and the standards, the pit, the slight breeze in the late April afternoon, the sun, the grass, me, we all worked together.
    Because all sports are artificially separated from life, and because high jumping is especially circumscribed—you jump, you sit for half an hour, then you jump again—it became safe for me to feel my emotions in that area. Moreso even than feeling them, I allowed them to overwhelm me, giving up control until I no longer felt the exuberance, joy, anger, but instead became them.
    I was an excellent jumper, made for the sport both physically and emotionally, but I took to throwing tantrums when I missed important jumps. I'd curse and hurl my sweats, or sometimes pull my shoe partway off and kick it as far as 1 could—thirty yards was my best. Each time I did this, my coach pulled me aside and put his arm around my shoulder. He'd softly say, "Real athletes don't need to do that." What he didn't know, and what I couldn't articulate, was that I was secretly overjoyed to be showing any emotion at all, no matter how unsportsmanlike it seemed to him.
    Maybe I was just growing up. Whatever the case may be, it seemed that the experience of unimpeded emotion when I jumped made it harder for me to ignore my feelings elsewhere.
    Just as the return of warmth makes frostbitten fingers feel like they're on fire, this period of gradual return was in many ways the most difficult of my life, more difficult even than childhood. I was beginning to feel things again. My first new look at the unhappiness I saw blissfully accepted by those around me was shocking. I became at first deeply confused, and then just as deeply convinced that awareness, and feeling, led inevitably to decreased happiness. Scientist that I was, I came up with the following: Happiness equals one over the quantity one plus Aware ness. (Yeah, I know, I was a geek.) Trying this equation on my fellow students, I received nothing but confirmation: Thank God I'm a happy idiot; You think too much; Who cares? and the ubiquitous Of course I hate it here, but when I get out I'm gonna get a red Porsche.
    A friend asked, "If increased