In life there are more opportunities to fall than there are pre-disaster teachers to alert us to the dangers and help us avoid them. I mean those wisdom-guides who get inside us soul-deep so that we become alert but not afraid. Able to trust ourselves when the inevitable occurs.
There’s much more to the process of falling than meets the eye.
Today, I watched a CBS Sunday Morning segment on Michael J. Fox and a quintessential dignity: the lightness of a human being bound within the confines of a disabling human condition. Whether on the meteoric rise of good experience or a fall facilitated by Parkinson’s, the man offers perspective with more than a touch of grace and humor. There are a relative few in life who get this grand illusion/display/joy/tragedy that life really is. He is one of them. Whatever happens, still he rises.
I fell several times in 2014, before a brilliant physical therapist noted my periods of weakness were caused by weakened hip labrum that I could repair myself with hard work and care. Which I did. But how I hated the indignity of falling, even as I tended to the work and rhythms of my body— and walking— as never before. For some time, I doubted I could help myself and bought a cane. And then I stopped falling, even recovering bone loss in the process. “You strengthened at your core,” said my physical therapist. More than physical healing, I learned to take no strength for granted.
Flash forward to clinical chaplain training, where I was called to the bedsides of many people younger than I, dying primarily because first, they’d fallen. (Ask anyone at your local EMS/Fire Department what their #1 emergency call involves.)
Here I’ll introduce a rather obscure article by Leonard Kriegel, “Falling into Life.” His own degenerative disability is the result of childhood polio. I came across his reflection an anthology of pieces written by people with disabilities called Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out. Published in 1997, I saved the volume because of the truths it held relative to us all. The day will come when we must at least adjust to lessened capacity as time flies by.
“It is not the actual death a man is doomed to die but the deaths his imagination anticipates that claim attention as he grows older…[making us] aware of [our accruing] limitations and imbalances,” Krueger begins.
Twenty-five years ago, I took his firing salvo as a life lesson: “Don’t make the primary focus of your elder life all the things you are scared of or everything you perceived you lost.”
But it’s Krieger’s account of his increasingly incessant falling that I accepted as a sacred teaching.
He tells of an occasion of his falling down humiliatingly and hard. He writes of tedious physical therapy sessions, and how his therapist tried to help him retain the courage to walk upright when possible through learning the art of falling. There is an art to it; we see it in the martial art of aikido, we glimpse it in the relaxation and roll of children’s bodies as they tumble. But we adults tend toward physical, mental, and spiritual rigidity, in more ways than we know in this distracted life. (I’m convinced many of us, at times me included, just stop seeing themselves at all.) It’s tiresome to ourselves and to those around us if we insist on our limited perspective about what is and isn’t possible.
Leonard Krieger finally gave in after weeks of instruction and struggle on the mat.
“And then, terror simply evaporated. It was as if I had served enough time in that prison…I found myself faced with a necessary fall—a fall into life…’That’s it!’ my therapist shouted triumphantly. ‘You let go! And there it is!’” It happened – a fall that left him in a life- and limb-preserving position.
Kreiger’s story of learning to safely negotiate unavoidable falls reflects mastery, and the soul-deep work of locating that place within:
“So it was that I stood above the mat and heard myself sigh and then felt myself let go, dropping through the quiet air, crutches slipping off to the sides. What I didn’t feel this time was the threat of my body slipping into emptiness, so mummified by the terror before it that the touch of air preempted even death. I dropped. I did not crash. I dropped. I did not collapse. I dropped. I did not plummet. I felt myself enveloped by a curiously gentle moment in my life. In that sliver of time before I hit the mat I was kissed by space.”