The Tale of the Girl and the Hula Hoop

I'd seen them before, on the many times I breezed past them on the way to Sam's room, and she'd talked about them--in the din of a venue called Lit that was the opposite of its name, she'd slipped away from Melly and I to admire a girl with an LED hoop, then came back with her hair slicked back from sweat and a perma-grin staining her mouth. But on that day, after I'd run from campus to her and Melly's apartment, they caught my eye, leaning against the wall next to my door.

"Hey, Sam!" I called into the darkness of the apartment. "When are you gonna teach me to hoop?"

I'd learn their personalities later--the heavy huge grip-tape-stripped hoop with a slight bend in the middle that made it ovular and not round; the flimsy purple child's hula hoop that came apart whenever you tried to do something more complicated than isolations; the two smallest hand hoops that Sam had made, her first foray into hoop-making; and the two larger hand hoops, wrapped in redorange tie-dye grip tape.

We set up camp on the deck outside of her apartment, a wooden platform barely big enough for the both of us, and for the next three days, Sam taught me how to hoop. Most of the time the only noise between us was the sound of the big hoop crashing to the ground, but other times, we talked. We talked and talked and talked and talked. Hours passed and my abs ached and my hips had gone numb and my lower back was a steady, throbbing pulse. All the while, the music played and we hooped.

The next day, I ran to her house again, up that ungodly hill and then down, free-fall running, the other side. We hooped and hooped and hooped until I couldn't separate the movement from my body and later, when I came home exhausted and aching, I found myself swirling my hips with an invisible hoop.

And then I had a revelation.

Suddenly, it all made sense. My body and the hoop were one, making invisible spirographs in the air, twisting and twirling and never ever falling off of my hips. And then there was more to learn, more to master: the vortex, isolations, hand hoops tricks, shoulder hooping, leg hooping. It never stopped.

I owed it to myself to persist because the better I got, the more I learned. And the more I learned, the more comfortable with the hoop I got, the easier the tricks became.

And so I disappeared inside of persistence.

There is a gap, as Ira Glass once said, between being an amateur and being an expert, and that gap is filled with mediocrity. But the only way to get better at something is to not give up, even when your abs are so sore that you can't even get up from your chair without wincing. You smooth out all the brain cells that are unsure and you make them sure, with the movement of your body, with the tapping of your fingers on keys. I think most people give up during this period because it isn't rewarding, beside calorie-burning, to do the same thing over and over again. But once you get it, you can twist it whatever way you want. You become more comfortable with whatever--your hips, your hoops, your words--and then you can manipulate them.

Today, when I climbed the three flights of stairs to Sam's apartment, I knew the movement of my body before it started.