Falling

Most of what I see and do is eventually lost forever in a fog of faded memory - as I get older things seem to disappear with alarming speed. But some remain. I’m fascinated by what sticks around… how and why those images or experiences manage to squeeze through the cracks and find a permanent home in my memory bank. My favourite theory so far is that our brains are smarter than we are. We might not even be aware of why an event is important, or the learning it might hold for us down the track…but our brains are, and so they hang on to feed these ideas back to us later, when we’re ready.

For instance, I went to a Cirque du Soleil show many years ago. The performances must have been incredible, I remember being impressed, but the only thing I recall clearly was very near the opening. A man was dressed as an angel/bird type character, all in white with enormous feathered wings, suspended high above us. For some reason I’ll confess I didn’t understand, even at the time, his character fell from his perch. He was still held by hidden wires but mimed perfectly, and in slow motion, the act of falling to the earth. His back was arched, his wings caught imaginary currents of air and freewheeled in random and heartbreakingly beautiful patterns. I held my breath the entire time it took him to fall. It was the saddest and most exquisite thing I’d ever seen on a stage.

Why did that vision impact me so much? Why can I still see it so clearly in my mind’s eye, all these years later? My best guess: something in that fall spoke to me. I didn’t know it then, but I know it now. I couldn’t imagine at the time that one day I would fall heavily, painfully. That I would leave my perch in the most ungraceful and clumsy way and come crashing down to earth. That’s how it felt, when I fell, as so many of us do. Whether through our own actions, or someone else’s, our lives come crashing down. Living through it, there is not a single thing that is beautiful or delicate about that process. It is pain, pure and simple.

But, having lived through it, and when we can bear to look back again, we can see it in slow motion. We can see the moments of grace where we made a better choice, for others, and for ourselves. We can see the moments of mercy when someone came to sit with us, or called us, just to let us know that we weren’t alone. And we can see, so very clearly, that we have survived. We have changed, we have grown, but most importantly we have survived, and that is the most beautiful thing of all.