Meditation is not a new concept to me. My dad started teaching me when I was very little. He was deeply interested in metaphysics and philosophy, so his small daughter received an early education in breathing techniques, concentration, mental discipline, and the many extraordinary things a person might supposedly accomplish with enough practice.
This did not, however, come without consequences.
The basic idea was that if you meditated, practiced your breathing, and learned to focus properly, you could eventually do almost anything. Levitate. Walk through walls. Grow a new set of teeth. You know. The basics.
My dad told me stories about fakirs and mystics who had developed these abilities. Perhaps an adult would have understood them as stories about human potential. I was eight. I understood them as instructions.
Every day, I meditated. I did my own little-kid version of it which, to be honest, may not be all that different from what I do now. This continued for months.
Then one morning, I woke up, sat upright in bed, and knew. I was ready. I remember it so clearly. Man, it feels as though it happened yesterday. I had such faith. I had no doubts. Today was the day I was going to fly.
Yep. I had meditated for what seemed like ages and felt I had turned some sort of significant corner in my practice. Spoken like a true eight-year-old, hey?
Did I fly? I most certainly did. How... is another matter.
We lived in a split-level apartment, with the couch on the upper floor. I dragged it to the edge of the stairs, climbed onto the top of the armrest, and flung myself full-force toward a patch of empty air above the ground floor. I held nothing back.
I threw myself into the air with complete abandon, arms stretched out in front of me, Superman-style. I fully expected to remain suspended in the exact spot I had selected before takeoff. I had not put down cushions or taken any other safety precautions. Why would I? I was ready. I could levitate.
Did it occur to me to begin with a small practice attempt from a standing position? Heck no. That was for people of little faith.
I flew, all right — head-first into the hard wooden floor.
I broke my nose and sprayed blood everywhere. It was the first of several broken noses to come, much to the despair of my poor parents.
The crash must have been spectacularly loud because my mom came running from the kitchen and my dad from the bedroom. My mom looked at me. Then she looked at my dad. She knew that, somehow, he was responsible for this behavior.
My dad crouched beside me, inspected the blood and the angle of my nose, and said, with complete confidence: "Yvette-kem, you simply did not meditate enough." Yvette-kem meant "my dear Yvette."
I had not meditated enough? Huh. Had I missed something here?
"Keep practicing," he continued. "We will add more push-ups to your routine too, to toughen you up a bit."
I did not blink, argue, blame him, or hesitate. I said, "Okay."
Do not get the wrong idea. This was not blind obedience to a parent. I believed him because I believed in the entire project. I kept practicing. Every single day.
Six months later, I attempted to fly again. This time, I chose the balcony of our 11th-floor apartment. I did not succeed, obviously, as I am still here.
This time, I was not going to jump. The couch had cured me of that. I wanted to feel what levitation might be like with the wind to help me, to let it lift me and carry me a little.
To this day, it gives my mom chills whenever she is reminded of it. Sorry, Mom.
You know how surfers wait for the perfect wave to ride? That was precisely what I was doing. I was waiting for the perfect gust of wind. No, I am not kidding.
I do not believe I was a delusional child. I was incredibly motivated, curious, and highly experimental. Pain and discomfort did not put me off the way they seemed to put off most of my friends. They may, admittedly, have had more sense.
I climbed over the railing until I was hanging off the outside by my fingers, eleven floors up. There I was, enjoying the sun, listening to the leaves rustling in the nearby trees, and waiting calmly as the wind began to pick up. I was waiting for my wave.
Yes, I knew about gravity. My mind contained no self-doubt whatsoever. I had decided this was going to happen, and therefore, it must.
My mom was in the kitchen. When she walked into the living room, she happened to look toward the balcony. She saw my fingers gripping the inside of the ledge. She could not see the rest of me. Needless to say, she freaked out. Slightly.
She ran onto the balcony, grabbed me with both hands, and threw me back over the ledge and into the apartment in one movement. She is stronger than she looks. The places where her hands had clamped onto me swelled afterward as though I had been struck by something extremely hot and heavy.
She barely spoke to me after that. She informed me that I was banned from the balcony and was not to so much as look in its direction. That was the end of the conversation.
She was right to be terrified. I can see that now in a way I never could have at eight.
I suspect she gave my dad hell later in private. My dad and I routinely got into trouble together for all kinds of schemes, so this would not have been unusual.
The following summer, when I was finally allowed onto the balcony again, I managed to get myself banned for another six months.
I blew up the couch.
In fairness to me, I was conducting an experiment. My dad and I were constantly exploring the natural world together. He preferred letting me learn by doing things rather than sitting me down and lecturing me about the answers. He had shown me several methods of starting fires: using string and wood, striking different metals and stones together, and focusing sunlight through magnifying glasses of various strengths.
The magnifying glasses were the subject of my experiment that afternoon. I was trying to determine the optimal combination of distance and time required to produce a flame. I was scientific.
The couch was an old hand-me-down my parents had placed on the balcony. My dad had decided that a few tiny burn holes would not be a great loss. Unfortunately, I located one particularly dry patch of fabric. The couch did not smolder. It exploded into flames.
By the time my mom saved the day, yet again, the couch was a pile of wet rubble and the entire balcony was black and charred.
I would like to make one thing very clear. This was the first afternoon I had been allowed onto the balcony alone following my six-month ban. It was also my last afternoon out there for another six months.
At the time, I considered this deeply unfair. I had never been deliberately mischievous. I was not trying to damage anything. I was curious. I made notes. I used the process of elimination. I wanted answers to my burning questions about life.
My poor mom wanted a household governed by strict, rigid, sensible rules. Instead, she got a Gemini child who wanted to be free from every rule ever written and was willing to experiment with gravity, fire, and her mother's nervous system in pursuit of knowledge.
I enjoy the story now. I did not enjoy the balcony ban. After all, I had not been misbehaving.
I was doing research.