Have you ever fallen? I mean falling hard on the ground – smack, thud, scrape. It could have been some time you fell off a wall or down a hill, or you lost your balance on your bike and scraped the road, or maybe you were trying to carry something heavy and you lost your balance. If you’re able to pay attention to your body as you’re wavering and tipping over, you’ll sense a quivery feeling in your limbs and your gut well before you actually lose your balance, before your momentum tips entirely. It’s the last chance you get to right yourself – your body is giving you a warning shot. You can avoid the plunge but only with a bit of an heroic effort, and only if you know you don’t want to drop.
Our bodies are real, beautiful, material things, and as such, they are subject to gravity on this earth. And if you look at our bodies, they are well designed for most of what we do, but then we push them and do dangerous things beyond their design limits. Falling is one of the inevitable results. We learn as children to use our muscles to adjust our balance and prevent falls before they occur. The mind and soul learn to fear uncontrolled surrenders to gravity, learning the lessons of the breaks, bruises and scrapes of our physical self.
It’s felt like I’ve been falling a lot in the past few years, not physically – I have a decent sense of balance – but in my whole being. It started about four years ago, when the first part of my time in London came to an impasse. I was in North America, first in Toronto for a conference and an office visit and then in Maine to visit my mom, who had broken her back in a boating accident. In Toronto, my boss called and told me he was resigning, and he asked me to act in a joint capacity with a colleague of mine as an interim head of the department. I didn’t like my job, but my boss was one of the few things that had kept me motivated to stay. I took the call from him outside of Air Canada Centre, and wandered around the plaza while we talked. I joked with him – he didn’t necessarily get all the jokes; he’s French, I’m from Maine, and our sense of humor never meshed well – but as we talked I felt my gut start to dissolve. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be “interim co-head” of the department, and I knew it was the beginning of the end of something. I told him I’d take the role, and we signed off.
I flew to Maine and my mom spent two days telling me how scared she was for me, how she thought I was losing my grip on living an integrated life. She had fractured her back and was on a lot of painkillers, to be taken every four hours, so the conversations lasted for an hour or so at a time – immediately after she took a dose, she’d fade off into a kind of delirious sleep, then wake up after an hour or two and she’d talk until the dose wore off. It always wore off with a bit of time to go before the four hours were up, and when it fully wore off she would be in too much pain to talk – but in the middle there was time. I’d ride those cycles of talking, pain, new dose, sleep, new talking, and I’d feel the falling sense building each time, especially as I helped her take another pill and saw her drift into sleep, reflecting on what she had told me and knowing there would be another message coming soon, knowing that I could put a stop to it if I wanted to – the next time she got up I could always talk over her, or watch some television with her, or whatever – but not really having the strength of will to do so.
I heard her out as she accused me of giving up on my own life, and knew she was right, and knew having heard her that I couldn’t go back to just ignoring that reality, but I didn’t know what would happen next. I was falling – between my boss and my mom, I had been willingly pushed off the unstable precipice that I had been falsely trying to convince myself was my designated perch. My gut entered into a low dull faint ache, not so much that I couldn’t function but enough to tell me, I’m in the air, I’m falling fast, the ground is somewhere but it’s not below me yet and when I land, it will hurt.
That ache continued and grew inside me over the next year. I realized I had failed in my marriage, that it was slowly strangling both my wife and me. I realized I had lost the plot on being a father, unable and unwilling to find the connection I wanted with my son. I was caught up in a career that was both incredibly distracting – with travel, internal politics, lots of complex problems – and incredibly dull at the same time. The ache grew and grew. I met someone who was in a similar place, and it felt great to reach out and feel the hand of someone who was also falling, but I was still falling, and the hand that I held was probably just being pulled down. And then finally I was sitting on the pavement across the street from my house in London, my dog at my side on a cold dark January night, and I realized I had to leave my wife and try to find bottom, I had to land, I couldn’t keep falling. I walked across the street and told her we needed to get a divorce.
The falling feeling didn’t stop. It just felt like I fell faster.
I left my job after my department was transferred to a new executive. I started doing some work for an old friend of mine who was trying to make a startup company work. I was in love. I traveled around France. But I kept sensing that I was falling, even as I tried every now and again to convince myself I had found the bottom, that I could finally look around and feel what I had broken, what was still intact, and start climbing again. I moved back to Seattle and worked on getting my divorce in order, and I got to know my son for the first time. My new partner tried to move to the states with me but she hated it. The falling feeling got worse, broken up with occasional weekends or moments of joy and the exaltation of being in love, which were as real as anything I’ve ever felt but they didn’t manage to pierce through the underlying drop at terminal velocity towards a bottom that still hadn’t emerged.
My girlfriend and I split up once, then got together again, then split again, and finally split for good a few months ago. When that happened, in the space that emerged, the full horror of realizing that I still felt that spiraling descending rushing feeling, more than three years after the pit had first opened up in my stomach, almost made me despair. How could I keep falling, over and over again? Why was there no ground? All falling requires gravity, and gravity comes from a source – where was that source?
When I was in the Ardeche last month on my retreat, I went out for a nighttime walk – there was a spectacular full moon on a windy night with clouds racing through the sky, the moon appearing and reappearing, casting shadows into the rough dark valley and then suddenly illuminating the trees and the farmhouses with a ghostly white light. The house I was staying in was on a terrace above the single-lane track that constituted the hamlet’s main road, with a steeply sloped ramp leading down. There was no railing on the ramp, and I misjudged where the bottom was, turned right to start on the lane, and then fell four feet or so onto the rough eroding pavement.
I knew just before I spilled over that I was going to fall. I could feel the space open up beneath my right foot while my left knee and quad were getting ready to release into the step, and I had a split second where I knew that I could still tense my left leg back to a full rigid line, leaning back to reset my center of gravity, and avoid falling over the side of the ramp. But I didn’t. I didn’t really care if I fell or if I stayed upright. It had been a long day, a day of meditation on my own incapacity to embrace myself. My body was exhausted and on some level, I think I wanted to feel my body in extremis – I wanted to feel something that would overwhelm the rest of me, my mind and my heart and my soul. And those other parts of me were beaten up, they were tired and sad and felt terrible at how ruthless they could be and how that had been revealed over sessions of breathing, of focus, of searing examination by someone I trusted and who just asked me to live inside of my self without fear.
While I wasn’t in the fall itself for more than a split second, my right foot finding no purchase in the shadows, I could feel all of my limbs go limp, and my core melted and churned and dissolved and disappeared. I hit the ground on my right knee, the top of my right foot, my left hand, my right shoulder. The road scraped the skin of my leg and I started to bleed, while a bruise quickly welled up on my upper arm and chest, and I could feel the tiny gravel bits embed themselves deeply in my left palm. My momentum rolled me on to my right side, and in my head, I could hear the echo of a sound, a kind of blunt crunch, a flop with sandpaper, the dull thud of a body hitting the ground.
I lay still for a moment and then stood up, my right ankle struggling under my weight and the searing pain of my left hand forming a bubble in my head. I couldn’t feel the scrapes on my right leg – I had taken off enough skin that the nerve endings were temporarily without sense – but I could feel the blood immediately start to run down my shin and over the crown of my foot. I suppressed a yell and, in the spirit of the day’s earlier meditations, I focused and allowed myself to feel my own pain. I let it spread through my body, the spreading out dissipating the intensity, and as it first flowed through my body and out to my fingers and toes and then ebbed back to my center and back to the places where I hurt, I realized the sense I had of falling was gone. My gut had reformed in itself, there was none of the vague queasiness that had welled up so fast and so intensely in the tiny fraction of a second before the fall began, replaced by a grounded sense of being alive and that, in living, my small scrapes and bruises would heal, were already healing.
I was in Maine again last week, supposedly just for a day but some airport shenanigans left me stranded. After two hours of sitting at the gate, then boarding, then taxiing, then returning to the gate and deplaning and being told that “the runway is closed for repairs,” I rebooked for a couple days later and spent a little time with my parents. It was quiet, a bit overcast. We talked the way you do when you don’t know what the real topic of conversation should be but you know one another so well that you can dip into the well of memory or the landscape of current events and find snippets to sustain you. Midway into the second day I felt the inside of me open up and suck me in, and I was falling again. This was a different sensation, though, a sense of immediately spinning down – there wasn’t that lilt at the top of the momentum shift that gives you that moment to pull back.
It occurred to me at that point that really, I’d never stopped falling, never hit the ground really, and that maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do. I had a sense that there is no center drawing me down, there is no ground anywhere, and any time I think there is, I was just fooling myself.
Maybe.
Here I am, on a Saturday afternoon in the kitchen. I look at my son – he’s drawing and playing with knick knacks at the table, now washing a cup in the sink – and I wonder what he feels. I think back to when I was a little boy and I used to feel like I was falling all the time. It was the same sense tipping over on my bike, as it was when I was willing myself to get off the bus and head into school. It was falling, the moment of impact sometimes defined by talking with my school mates who didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand them, and sometimes it was real, physical ground that I hit. Whenever I talked to people I felt the sense of falling, until I had gotten a sense that I thought they wouldn’t laugh or mock or ignore me, a sense that often never came. Whenever I left my room the feeling appeared in my gut.
I look at my son and there are times where I see that strange absence in his eyes that I feel when I’m falling. It happens just before he takes his shoes off at gymnastics, and before we get into the car to go to preschool or to camp. He still gets that look when his mother and I are together with him; he learned to worry about us long before the divorce, probably from his first moments outside the womb. His mother and I are a lot better together now, we’ve reset ourselves apart, but you can tell that it’s hard for my son to unlearn the feeling that the two of us together will create something unpredictable and potentially scary.
That feeling of falling is our lot in life if we try new things – if we’re open to growing – if we’re growing up. Sometimes we’re pushed – we try new things because our parents make us do it, or because our parents are falling too, or because our job or lack thereof forces us to expand out of our typical routine. Hopefully, most of the time we jump off the cliff of our own volition. Our leaps of faith involve casting ourselves off of our false precipices and resuming the spiraling fall that began before we were born, when we started the process of learning to be alive.
What I see in my son, though, and what I see in the people I know who possess something of inner peace, is an ability to lose the desire to find the ground. For them, there’s no hoping for the end of the drop, no terrified expectation of hitting ground, and no desperate need for the fall to end. I see them dropping towards the endless and limitless universe and they’re playing, they’re like otters rolling in the current and slapping the water, they’re smiling and happy as they plunge away from the cliffs from which they leapt.
But here’s something I just realized today: they aren’t actually falling. There is no drop, there is no gravity. When you step off the cliff, the feeling of falling, the feeling of leaving the earth, is just your mind clinging to its own memories and assumptions of what happens when you fall because it couldn’t realize all along that you could float. Our mind assumes that because our bodies always fall, so too will our heart and soul and mind when our spiritual ground disappears from beneath us. But that’s wrong. When we leave behind everything that kept us chained to the ground – everything, even the idea of faith we had when we were grounded – we actually aren’t leaping, we’re levitating. My son hasn’t been taught to expect the bottom yet, and I hope he never does. The people who amaze me most are those who were trained to expect and fear the fall, but learned of their own will that it was a lie, that they can fly.
I have a friend who keeps telling me to research teleportation. Won’t it be great to give the world the gift of traveling anywhere at an instant? I keep telling her that it’s impossible. And it is, at least from the perspective of physical reality. Just like the idea of floating is silly from the perspective of physical reality. We walk down the ramp, we take a turn too early, and the we rush towards the ground and hit the tarmac and we bleed and we hurt. But we don’t need physical teleportation if we can take our entire being into whatever memory or imagination we want. And we can fall as much as we must on this earth – whether because of clumsiness, or darkness, or being pushed – but when we fall in our spirit, we have the means to find the way to realize that we don’t need the ground, if we just remember that the ground we cling to, the cliff edge we can’t leave, is what’s preventing us from learning how to soar. I have no doubt that we can teleport our being to wherever we want to go, even if our physical self remains rooted to time and space – and I know now from experience that we can fall and never hit the ground.
I’m still no good at this soaring not falling thing. The feeling I get in my gut is usually still that of dropping into a void that will end soon, that will terminate in the ground, that will scrape and break me bodily or in spirit. I’m starting from the end and working back: I’m not looking for the fall to end anymore, and I’m practicing not craving the certainty of hitting the ground. It still feels like falling, but eventually, I’ll learn to float. And anyway, there is no ground – so I’ve got time to learn.
I’ve fallen a lot, and I’m still in the air. I hope I can stay here for a very, very long time, and learn to play and soar and float without fear. I’m not there yet, but I know it’s possible, and that’s enough for today.