falling down

I am just back from my mom's 93 birthday where I managed to fall down again and whack my ribs. This is only worthy of comment because in the last year I have fallen down more than in my whole life.  I fell down and got five stitches at Mount Sinai at the nurses station.  I fell down in the subway running to catch a bus. I fell down in the street, in the elevator and various other interesting venues. This last time I fell down  was two days ago trying to find Bushy's dog who had decided to go for a stroll in the neighborhood at ten at night.

One might ask .. big deal birdie you are falling down.  I do think though that there is a pattern here.  I fall down when the noise and the chaos of life seem to be so loud I can  barely think. I am to respond to the unfamiliar from the stance of the familiar which simply does not work.  There is a disequilibrium that comes when the comfort zone is far out of whack.  I am not sure this has much to do with gravity as it has with our own precarious place in our own lives.  I have gone, for example, from married to widow, from coupled to uncoupled, from comfortable to painful in the space of a few months.  It is not to complain but it is to say that it changes the lens that saw the world in one way - the familiar to the unfamiliar.    To borrow a tired cliché it is Alice's rabbit hole. 

The painful piece of this is that falling down is really about getting up and how to do that with grace, determination and the realization that tom would love to be getting up is the trick.  Sentimentality only goes so far. Rather this is question of "staying on your pins" and moving forward without breaking your bones or your heart.