I posted the following quote on FB the other day, never thinking I would literally go through it.
Yup, it happened.
“Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart:
a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor.”
~ Marianne Williamson
So, I’m out for my walk yesterday, still processing all the recent health diagnosis that are too frightfully boring and ‘chronic’ and ‘rare” and ‘serious’ feeling to go in to and walking daily is what I love but also part of my ‘healthy living plan” (Oh God, Ive become one of those older people) and thinking about which car was in the driveway while looking ahead at said driveway and not on the ground and I turned an ankle on a stone perfectly round like a squash ball and down I went, on my knees and arm and wrist and shoulder and holy F*%K, it hurt like the be jeesus. Luckily I carry my iPhone with me, so I can measure my peak heart rate so I called middle daughter to help and of course she did (daughter number one got in a comment about a walker before I told her where to put her that nonsense) and one of them had a comment about me not wearing my glasses.
This quote now makes so much more sense, Marianne was out for a walk without her glasses and tripped and fell!
All joking aside, it is true; as I lay there in considerable physical and emotional pain, of being ill, of getting older, of being in a failing marriage, of being one of those people I said I would never become (how did I think I could avoid health issues?), something in me let go, released, shook free and I don’t know that I feel noble, however, my knees certainly hit the floor, in this case pavement, I do feel humble and like my world has fallen apart and I guess I can see a glimmer of beauty and a little bubble of a giggle as I listen to my daughter with the dry sardonic wit describe the event to her sisters (‘yeh, I had to help her up, she was a mess, she was wailing like a newborn baby’, which we will have soon in the family) and in all of this perhaps the beauty is that of authentic raw vulnerability. I’m just like everybody else, I feel, I hurt, I need help and in that I feel compassion, I feel universal pain, I feel universal hurt, I feel universal compassion. We are all the same and there’s the beauty.
namaste