LEARNING TO FALL

Falling is not failure. Getting up is not the point.

I’ve been falling all my life. I learned to fall as a martial artist. I am learning it again with long COVID. But it was my daughter’s death that taught me falling is as unavoidable as gravity. Both can be a grace.

Our fear of falling debilitates us. The fall itself can be excruciating; it may in fact be life-changing; but in this, believe it or not, gravity is our friend. One of the first things I learned in that long-ago gym in South Korea was how to fall. The lesson has served me well.

In martial arts, particularly in my discipline, hapkido, I step into my opponent’s circle. Defense and offense require being within reach. I face two important realities: I will be hit; I will fall down.

In the actual event, neither may occur, but this knowledge has a pragmatic benefit. I no longer fear my fall. I judge the onrushing ground, bend my body to land on the least vulnerable spot, and roll into a fall when possible.

“Falls knock us off our feet, confusing the sense of our place in the world,” writes Ann Cooper Albright, Professor and Chair of the Department of Dance at Oberlin College, who frequently publishes on philosophy. “Falling refers to what was while moving toward what will be. . . . Taken seriously, falling can teach us about connecting to the support of gravity, helping us navigate the inevitable slips and failures of life with a little more imagination and grace.”

Now, suffering with long COVID, I have days when my legs give out from under me. I use gravity to fall, to bend, to roll. And I lie there. Pausing on the floor, I gain a new perspective. There is no rush to get up. I fell down, that’s all. It’s not the end of the world.

“To be disoriented is to be undone, thrown off-balance,” continues Albright. “But it also hints at a deeper knowledge. We rarely think about where we are until we have been lost. In order to understand what orients us, we need to experience disorientation.”

Our society pushes the idea that what matters is getting up after a fall. This misses the point entirely. Gravity is not an evil; it is a tool. Falling is not failure. We all fall, literally and figuratively.

When my daughter Jess died, I felt the floor give way beneath me. Suddenly my legs were unreliable. An outside force pushed me to my knees. In grief beyond words, my soul cried to God for help. To this day, in the same way that I know I am breathing or typing these words, I know that he heard me.

That terrible night I experienced the same sensation of falling that I knew in many a sparring session, with one important difference: I am still falling. Grief is unending. Jess’s absence can never be resolved. No amount of “getting up” will return her to me, not until the moment of my death when I hold her in my arms again. I fall as I love, ceaselessly, vulnerably, yet with an odd confidence that I need not stick the landing. I may let myself fall.

Life knocks us down. It is the price of this world, however much we kid ourselves otherwise. Our falls become part of us. “‘The river’s injury is its shape.’ I’ve learned no more,” wrote poet and Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry. “Gravity is grace.”

In work of love, the body

forgets its weight. And once

again with love and singing

in mind, I come to what

must come to me, carried

as a dancer by a song.

This grace is gravity.

— Wendell Berry, “The Gift of Gravity”

I fell again today. My legs betrayed me. I bent sideways, landed on a shoulder and turned on my back. From there I saw rain outside my window, falling as I had fallen, surrounded by other drops that knew their own falls: each unique, yet none entirely alone. Nor am I alone. I have friends, family, and to my astonishment, a God who falls with me. I roll into each fall, and that makes all the difference.

For my friend, recently diagnosed.

Sources

Ann Cooper Albright, “Gravity Matters: A Meditation on Falling and Failing,” in Mica, Adriana, Mikołaj Pawlak, Anna Horolets, Paweł Kubicki, eds., Routledge International Handbook of Failure (Routledge, 2023): chapter 33. Wendell Berry, Collected Poems: 1957–1982 (North Point Press, 1984): 257–9.