Thus all doth fall

Every now and then, you remember that you’re in free fall.

You’re bumbling along, feeling grounded in your routines and contexts, and then out of nowhere your healthy parent gets a terminal diagnosis, or someone your age dies, or you read about an earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people, or you think about how most stretches of your life (like your middle school cafeteria) will never be accessible to you again, or you notice that you can’t quite remember things like you used to, or you have a choice to make between three different versions of your life, or you read that astronomers found a black hole millions of times more massive than the Sun, and you remember that this is you:

In free fall, you are…

• gripped by forces outside of your control

• unable to go in reverse

• beyond the reach of anything to hold onto

• unable to make sense of everything hurtling by

• moving toward an end that is (at best) uncertain and (at worst) the worst thing ever.

And in life, you are…

• being carried forward by time in one direction at an unrelenting pace

• experiencing a constant stream of inputs that you can’t count, isolate, order, and understand

• unclear about where you are (on a cosmic scale, spatially, temporally, causally)

• unclear about how you work (or how the universe¹ works)

• unclear about what to do (no objective instruction guide, rule book, timeline, to-do list, or goal to pursue)

• unable to ensure your own safety

• awaited by eternal non-existence (or something incomprehensible)

At least that’s how I feel a lot of the time. I’m often scrambling for the walls and anything to sink my nails into: photographing everything, making lists of everyone I’ve ever known, buying 17 different face creams, categorizing and recategorizing my experiences, reminding myself to appreciate this, appreciate this, appreciate this even if I don’t understand it.

Of course, there are plenty of religions, philosophies, and traditions that offer us orientation, but then occasionally you catch one of them at an angle and see through it as just another construct. You think to yourself: this isn’t the final ground.

I don't think we're getting a final ground!²

So how are we supposed to relate to the fall?

1. Quote | Attributed to Chögyam Trungpa

When I’m queasy, I remember this quote:

Yep. Same page.

If there’s no map that can tell us where we are, maybe it’s not a personal failure to feel lost. If there’s no possible way to prepare for the test, maybe it’s not a personal failure to be unprepared. We can stop wincing as if we’ll be hit with the objective verdict that we’ve misunderstood the assignment, taken the wrong path, or failed to arrive where we’re supposed to be.

I found a note in my phone: Get comfortable, Luce. Don’t be waiting with your shoulders to your ears, waiting to land. There is no landing! Relax the shoulders.

2. Poem | Rainer Rilke

I recently told a new friend (hi, Will!) that I don’t know how to relate to falling, and he proceeded to whip out a perfect response in the form of a poem.

THUS ALL DOTH FALL, AND THERE IS ONE WHO HOLDS THE FALLING!! 😮‍💨 
(And if ‘One’ and ‘His’ wig you out, just replace them with ‘universe’ or ‘whatever holds all universes’.)

The leaves fall into the void, and so does the Earth, and so do both of my hands, and so does everything — and that is the law — but it all happens in one reality that holds us.

3. Quote | Zen Koan

So, to recap:

We’re falling.
With nothing to hang onto.
But everything is falling.
And something holds the falling.

Now let’s add one more layer:

An open-eyed man!!

The man on the enlightened path chooses not to close his eyes to the vast ambiguity and nauseating vulnerability of his existence and relationship to the universe, but instead to witness them fully. (I hope he holds his falling self in love!)

4. Quote | Alan Watts

In his reflections on why we say ‘falling’ in love, Alan Watts says:

Watts tells us that the most powerful thing we can do in the fall is to surrender, to let go, to give ourselves up.

It’s all about relaxing into the fall like enlightened Barbie. 🙂

Giving ourselves up³ means embracing the reality that we’re being carried by a mysterious process on a mysterious journey and that, in some critical sense, things are out of our hands.

5. Quote | W.S. Merwin

In the process of thinking about falling, I came across a line from a wonderful W.S. Merwin poem:

But in the rush of my reading, I simply read it as:

“falling, we are saying thank you.”

Finally, a response I can rest in.

❤️

Sometimes I describe the feeling of falling as one of being orphaned — of feeling disconnected from what gave me life, or what holds all things. But I come to realize that I can’t possibly be disconnected from this thing. I don’t know what it is (and it's probably naive to even think of it as an it rather than some sort of all), but I'm definitely connected to it. I'm definitely still in it. It's definitely still producing new life every day!

Without parachute,⁴ we are saying thank you. :)

Lucy

1  We know about things like the Big Bang and evolution, but these still don’t help me orient to questions of our origins on the even longer horizon, or the even more foundational plane. They don’t (at least yet) answer questions about the source of consciousness or the nature of time— things that feel critical to process before I am to decide how to live!!!

2  To have final ground would be to 1) have a fundamental understanding of the universe/time/space/consciousness (i.e. understanding of the ultimate source and context of all things) in order to 2) be able to derive what I am and what I should do, and then separately to 3) know I’m in control of your fate — my aging, memory, safety, okayness. I can tell you 3 ain’t happening. But I think 1 ain’t either. I'm starting to come to terms with the likelihood that we really can't start from first principles because we’ll never know them. And that, in the absence of being able to start with what we know about the universe, we can (at best) start with what we know about being human, and design our lives from there.

3  Though, it strikes me that the attempt to become a person who ~surrenders~ might be another form of grasping for the walls — another way to control the experience. Maybe you don’t even need to become comfortable with falling! You can be scared, desperately wanting for walls, and closing your eyes sometimes!

4  To stop the fall, we’d have to hit the ground (die), or grasp walls, ropes, or learn to levitate. If you’re seeing walls or ropes or ways to levitate, let a girl know.