Stumbling into realizing that living in the moment might help

Susan Schwartz, Canwest News Service
Published: Thursday, January 22, 2009



I fell down a flight of stairs the other day -- harder than I have ever fallen. Tumbled spectacularly down 10 or 12 bare wooden stairs before landing, with a thud, winded and scared.

Mercifully, my rump, replete with padding, bore the brunt of the fall; although it swelled immediately and in short order turned an alarming shade of blackish-purple, I was fortunate not to have broken a limb -- or worse. Or banged my head. I know that. And 10 days later, I'm on the mend, physically: I can sit now, in relative comfort, and I no longer wake myself up each time I roll onto my back.

Emotionally, though, it's another story. I creep with exaggerated carefulness up and down the stairs these days, clutching the handrail in a way that puts me in mind of a former neighbour who went by the name of Miss Bump, either because it was her real name or one that her enormous dowager's hump had earned her: Miss Bump would move slowly up and down the staircase of the small building in which we lived, her eyes cast toward her feet. Some days she'd pass the time in a chair on the landing, a huge, old-fashioned clock in her lap.


I like to think I learned to compensate early for my lack of real athletic ability by being good at falling -- graceful, even, in tumbles on the ski hill or the sidewalk or the ice. You get to a certain age, though, and the whole notion of falling becomes less benign: Falls by older people are a leading cause of serious injury, even death. I am aware of the danger in a way I was not when I was younger.

Although I don't know how I came to fall, I do remember falling, remember feeling as if I was inside a huge front-loading washing machine and it was on, remember hoping -- praying, even -- that I wouldn't break anything. There was even time to make bargains: if something has to break, let it be an arm, not a leg -- and could it be the left, please?

We're wired to want explanations -- and at first I was freaked out by not having one for that fall, by its inexplicability and seeming randomness: It was a bright Saturday morning and I was well-rested and alert, one instant thinking how I was looking forward to shopping for the fixings for a dinner party that evening -- and by the next, I'd lost my footing and was struggling to catch my breath. Scary how time can be bisected like that -- everything fine one instant, in such disarray the next.

On a deeper level, though, I'm wondering whether the fall wasn't a symptom of my generally lackadaisical approach to life, whether I am perhaps not the author of my own misfortune more often than I'm prepared to acknowledge. I was wearing mules -- not ideal footwear for walking stairs. I was carrying a pile of books and a sweatshirt and, arguably, I was distracted. I'm constantly lugging stuff up and down the stairs -- and I'm almost always distracted. All this talk about being in the moment, of appreciating what we have now -- yet I rarely inhabit the moment: I'm almost always somewhere else.

Phil Simmons, a teacher and a writer who lived for nine years with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known also as Lou Gehrig's disease, left as part of his legacy a wonderful book of essays, Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life, published by Bantam in 2002, the year he died, at 45.

He was still walking when he wrote the first essay, but his balance was failing; he described stumbling and falling, hard, on a path near his New Hampshire home, lying stunned, lip bleeding and chest bruised. His daughter, Amelia, six at the time, came over, asked what he was doing down there.

"What I was doing was learning to fall," he wrote. It was true literally, but he meant it figuratively -- learning to live, richly and well, in the face of loss. And each of us has suffered losses and will suffer more, he wrote, from the waning of physical strength and the fading of youthful ideals to the loss of loved ones or a cherished hope or the fall into injury or sickness. The list is long.

During the days that followed, he thought about the expression "watch your step," about the Buddhist practice of walking meditation, in which one becomes fully mindful of every step on the Earth.


"One of the blessings of my current stumbling condition," Simmons wrote, "is that I must practice this meditation continually, becoming mindful where I once was heedless."

Thing is, we all stumble. I don't know that being afraid or hanging onto handrails will help. Being mindful, though, might.



http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/n...5-5f52935bb68b