Falling

When I was a child my siblings and I used to take turns jumping off our front hall stairs.  The point was to see how many steps you could jump off without crashing in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.  I think three was the most I ever managed, but I never was much of a daredevil. As I grew older I began having a recurring dream about jumping off those stairs.  In the dream I would climb halfway up the staircase, turn and leap, arms out.  I would always wake up before I hit the floor so I never knew if I was going to land safely or break my neck, but the sensation of flying was alternately exhilarating and terrifying.

As the years passed I began having a waking dream that I would one day tumble down a flight of stairs to my death.  The vision of this fall was so clear that it wasn’t really frightening, more like a coming attraction and a clear warning of how I would meet my maker. I don’t particularly fear stairs and in the search for cardiovascular health have a tendency to take the stairs when most everyone else is taking the elevator. But I don’t take the stairs as quickly as I used to or with carefree abandon.  I may in fact meet my end in a tumble down the stairs but I’m not ready for that yet.

 Falling is never a pleasant experience. Even when we fell as small children while learning to walk or ride a bike, we always looked to someone to pick us up, dust us off and wipe away our tears.

Life is full of falls.  Some result in mere scrapes, others in broken bones, figurative and literal.  The most we can hope for is for someone to be there to pick us up while we dust ourselves off and dry our own tears.

 The last five years of my life feel like an escalating series of falls.  I would barely start to get up when I would fall down again.  Among other things there were the deaths of loved ones, one after another.  Losing so many people in such a short time felt like that long airless fall from the top of the stairs.  A schism in the family that has continued to widen and deepen with time felt more like I’d been pushed off the highest peak to a certain death.  Every now and then I would catch a current of air and think the worst was behind me and that I could now glide to a soft landing, but I was wrong.  Suddenly there would be an obstacle to that soft landing and the fall would continue.

Tumbling through the air whether of my own volition or as the result of someone else’s push has taught me a few things.  If the fall is inevitable, you might as well lean into it, spread your wings and try to fly.  The good news is you might find that the wind pulls you along to a place you never knew you wanted to go, but are glad you found.  Or you might not be so happy to land where the fall drops you, but you find you can live there anyway.  Sure the eventual landing may leave you bloodied and bruised, but you can hope you learned something on the way down.

 When the days have been darkest, I have been able to draw from the same well of courage that allowed me to make the leap from those stairs in my childhood.  And that courage has allowed me to close my eyes, get lost in the sensation of being weightless and airborne and prepare for the next fall with the sure knowledge that the people who truly care about me will be there to soften the fall, pick me up and dry my tears.