Phenomenology and Jedi Training

I'm rediscovering my body the last few weeks, hiking for about 2 hours, three times a week on the trails at the North Mountain park area in central Phoenix. 

The steeper trails offer more solitude, so I break off the main trails at the earliest points, depending on what direction I'm headed. But steeper means...steeper. More energy to walk - and carry camera equipment, which I've done on a number of occasions.

In my teens and twenties I was pretty athletic - I skied, swam, biked, intramural sports, an occasional 10K run. In high school I ran track, wrestled, and played football and basketball (which is humorous, since I was about 5'0" at the time I shot hoops, and when I played football I weighed about 115 lbs).

So I've always considered myself coordinated on my feet, and balanced. Not so much these days, as I come down the steep rocky trails. I love the exercise, and I haven't fallen yet, but I don't feel balanced and coordinated like I once did.

Even when I did once feel light on my feet, it was nothing like the Jedi protagonists of the Star Wars: Rebels and Star Wars: Clone Wars animated series - Kanan Jarrus, Ezra Bridger, Ahsoka Tano, Anakin Skywalker, Obi Wan Kenobi.

One thing about those animations that bothered me at first, but I just accepted, though grudgingly: though the Jedi characters routinely got thrashed physically - thrown against walls and steel beams, slugged, jabbed, cut, stunned, tortured, beat, and all the extreme gymnastic contortions involving extreme G-forces - they always got themselves up off the ground, with all limbs intact, no headaches, no blackouts.

Ridiculous, that their bodies didn't break, rupture, bleed, collapse.

So I'm walking/jogging/rock hopping down a trail, and wanting to feel light again, agile, lithe...buoyant. I want to float down the trail, sensing my center of gravity, somewhere in my pelvis/torso region, as slightly buoyant, and so mitigating the downward pull of gravity, so that I can just lightly touch the rocks as I come down, floating, but with direct control over my speed and gravity through my center of gravity.

Then I think of the Jedi, and how this sense, this experience of buoyancy, through a long apprenticeship to develop power and control, could very well lead to amazing gymnastic feats. Not merely Olympic-qualifying, but uncannily inhuman.

You could leap across canyons, and up - essentially flying - to the top of skyscrapers or mountains. You could leap up to catch hold of a starship flying by. You could jump down into bottomless structures, and twist around poles on the way down to fling yourself right back up.

But what a traumatic, probably fatal beating you'd have to give your body just to do those things. It would (seemingly) put fatal stresses on your joints, your muscles, and inner ear, that your body would be thrashed - literally beat to a pulp.

Then I had my answer to the Jedi riddle: An essential aspect of their training, since they were younglings, would have involved developing their bodies - strengthening them way way beyond normal. At the same time, or subsequently, they would learn the trick - the magic - of buoyancy.

What does this have to do with phenomenology? I ask myself this! Because it's the lived body - the lived MIND - that suggested these things to me. And it fits intelligibly well with my so-far unsubstantiated speculation that humans can and will develop the ability to fly, at least as much as Jedi's fly.

If any dancers, fighter jet pilots, astronauts, or Olympic divers are in the audience, and can relate to anything in this post about buoyancy, and would like to share their reaction to my thoughts, I would love to hear from you.