I Fell Down 😥
and picked up a realization
Friday morning, on my way to work, I fell down. After writing about the sky, it was nice to give an early morning hug to the earth.
I spent all day worrying about the essay I was supposed to write this week. It felt so far, with my bruised right leg and sprained left one. My left palm had its skin peel away a bit, but my right hand itched to write. So after a day of limping and moaning with pain, I ended up wondering about the art of falling down. I love how life shakes up a little when we are tripped up by the ground beneath us. Is there a better way to fall? Can we leverage our fall?
When I replayed the Friday fall in my mind, in slow motion, I could spot what I felt: shock, gratitude, grief, and gladness, all of it in those few seconds.
shock
Shock is natural when one gets pulled down suddenly, because of a slippery chappal or a bump in the street, I was also shocked to feel the other three emotions.
gratitude
An uncle rushed to pick me up. Even in that after-fall daze, I noticed his kind face, his cotton mundu, silver-framed glasses, and a forehead coloured in concern. I felt grateful for the ubiquitous uncles of our country.
grief
A fall is an excellent check-up of your inner life. If you’re happy, bouncing around the world with a decently stocked store of self-esteem, a fall is a matter of laughter, it is a mere mud-kiss, the knee scratch is a love bite from the earth. You dust your butt off while others check if you’re okay. But if you’re already miserable, dealing with disappointment, sadness, and fear, a fall is like icing on the cake, blood icing on the tar cake that is. “Now this?” your head screams when you realise you’ve hit the ground. “Can’t even walk properly…” it scolds.
The grief I’ve been feeling since the past few days got amplified when I fell. I also attended a 2-second self-pity party on the ground. I almost cried, but didn’t, “You’re not a kid anymore,” the inner censor board announced. I had been a clumsy kid, and falling always brought the fear of annoying others. Even Newton would be surprised to see adults blaming a child for having fallen as if gravity and spilt water didn’t exist.
gladness
And yet, I felt a deep gladness for having fallen. When one’s mind is falling apart, falling down feels like the body is showing solidarity. It is syncing up with the fall I have been feeling in my head. On the ground, I felt strangely whole and integrated, as if all parts of me are together in this moment.
Falling also brings us back into the present. Rush, hurry, toy too much with future worries, and BAM! - you are shown your place, the only real place: the here and now of the present moment. And this time, while I was on it, the earth knocked some sense into me.
Falling helped me realise, that something isn’t right in my life, at a deep intuitive level, that it is decision-making time. I don’t know what kind of decisions await to be taken. But the disappointment hovering in my brain, sunk into my heart as grief, and the grief tumbled into my gut, and “This is it!” “I can’t go on like this,” said a quiet, determined voice inside. Are we all one fall away from a realisation?
It is ironic that I was teaching the song ‘I’ll try defying gravity’ in class, and kept humming it during my commute to school. I could not defy earth’s gravity, but I’m glad I picked up more than just my body when I got up.
Isn’t it fascinating, that when a writer falls, in love or in despair, sick or apart, we get a story? Not that they should fall more often than they already do, what with ideas and language always choreographing a new number in their brains. Life is punctuated with falls, cute ones, in the beginning, deadly ones at the end, and those in between, have a tremendous psychological offering. We can’t avoid falling altogether, but I hope when we fall, we can pay attention to the parts of us that are hurt, and the parts of us that are still strong, ready to take care of everything.