"The Fall"

Blog author-Karen Kendig

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

Confucius

We are smack dab in the middle of the fall season. Change is all around us. Leaves are falling from their branches. Syrup drips from the Maple trees while seeds continue to dislodge from their pods to be scattered by the wind, trampled underfoot, or eaten by birds and squirrels. Outwardly, everything seems to be descending into a grand finale.

The word fall has multiple meanings. I fell off a tractor once—lost my balance and made an uncontrollable descent that led to a long and arduous re-invent-ure. All change is a fall from something—employment, wealth, health, location, purpose, meaning, physical and mental well-being, wedded bliss, childlessness, and the list goes on. Fall is the messenger that change is in the wind.

Adam and Eve’s fall from grace in the garden gave us the gift of a conscious. As human beings we are not meant to sit in the garden of eternal bliss and perfection. Instead, we are called to open our eyes, smell the flowers, drink the water, and grapple with right and wrong, love and hate, loss and abundance. This famous couple’s symbolic fall revealed our humanness and imperfections. That fall from grace gave us freedom, free will, guilt, and shame, all of which make us responsible for our actions.

“The Fall” is the beginning of “The End” and the end is the beginning of the re-invent-uring process. Confusion, ambiguity, and uncertainty rule the days of this season. A sense of loss and being lost are common. When the loss is sudden and unwelcome like a death or accident, for many of us, there is a short time of reprieve from these feelings as we go into immediate survival mode. Dealing with doctors, funerals, paperwork, and such fills our brains with information piled on top of and smothering our emotions. Once all of that is behind us, the feelings find their way to the surface.

Some falls are on purpose—a choice we make to move our location or find a new job. That is when we struggle between “the devil you know and the devil you don’t know”. Will moving to a new location be better than staying and keeping our friends? Will the responsibilities and the stress of the new job be worth the extra money I’ll make? We debate back and forth with ourselves, trying to predict the outcome of a situation we have not yet entered.

There are other choices like marriage and having children, that scare us to death. Desire and love have made the decision for us, but that doesn’t mean we won’t lose our balance and take an uncontrollable descent into confusion and uncertainty over these life-altering doors we have chosen to open. Getting married to the one we love is a joyous decision and a life-long commitment to the unknown. The decision to have children is the same except you don’t even know the little person to which you are making this life-long commitment! Self-doubt and fear of failure may overtake you. After 48 years of marriage my husband still reminds me that I never actual said yes when he asked me to marry him. And I recall standing outside the sanctuary waiting to walk down the isles thinking “we can always get a divorce”!

Falls often leave scars and emotional baggage. I have a scar the size of a quarter on my right calf from the tractor incident. It took me years of physical therapy to reengage and grow muscles I had neglected over the years from my compensating gait. The death of my son has rendered me cynical and stoic, also empathetic and supportive. Falls become us—they make us who we are at any given time in our lives. Depending on your theology, falls may push us to be who we are meant to be. Without falls we would never learn to walk or ride a bike. We would never know how far we could climb or how high we could fly. Getting up from a fall shows us how strong we are and how far we’ve come. Sitting in a pristine garden and letting the apples fall off the tree and rot, is not a life well lived. Overcoming our repeated falls is how we grow and develop into our actualized selves. Staying down never served anyone.

Traversing the acknowledgment of “The Fall” takes as long as it takes. For some people it is easy to face the fall—for others denial is set at default. Once you realize there is turmoil brewing inside you and that for eternity or at least the unforeseen future this change is not reversible, the fall season will begin to make its transition into the next. If you follow the Re-invent-urer’s path from leaves and dead grass into the snow-covered arms of winter, you will have successfully met your first milestone to re-inventing your life.

Daily Meditation

Use this meditation this week to help you open yourself to the changes around and within you.

Grant me the patience to lean into the fall and the optimism to envision standing tall once again.