Watch Your Step

October 1^st has arrived and I greeted it with all my little quirky rituals. Which included turning the paper calendars in the house and reading the one with a message: 

 

Lovely photo and sage advice that I can attest to. Can’t we all? We jump from one stone to another and hope we don’t fall in the water. If we do, to paraphrase the song that Fred Astaire sang in Swingtime and  “pick ourselves up, dry ourselves off and start all over again.”

 

My daughter Talia is a fearless stone-jumper, not only in her daily work as a bold and adventurous 5^thgrade teacher, but in her weekend-life running marathons, snow camping, jumping into mountain lakes. And so the irony of her simply running with her cross-country team and mis-stepping on concrete and fracturing her foot. It’s not a happy prognosis— 2 months on crutches and 4 months before she can run again the first-draft first opinion and for someone as active as her, that will be like a prison sentence. Not to mention negotiating the stairs to her classroom and her house with a crutch. Aargh!

 

This news hit me in my heart’s core. And that’s the problem with empathy. The capacity to feel other’s pain can be a heavy burden to carry and if opened ourselves fully to it, the weight would be unbearable. Walking past the homeless, listening to the news, hearing stories from friends, on top of bearing up under your own challenges of physical, mental, emotional health. So we let in what we can and necessarily deflect the rest. Whatever choice do we have? Certainly not the one far too many take of refusing all empathy and creating the narrative that others deserve it so they can sleep at night. 

 

My wife and I called Talia while shopping (at Costco, of all places!) for food for my “belated birthday bash” this Saturday, my hope to get so many of the people I care about in one room with me still in it, alive and breathing. I will play music with my band, lead a little Orff workshop with old friends and neighbors who have never been in one with me as well as those who have and most exciting of all, read some of my poems written over the last 50 years, but rarely shared. Alongside the informal party socializing.  I’ve set aside three hours for it all and it already feels too short. 

 

But back to Talia. Talking to her, she felt resigned to it all and aware that she has cheated accidents like this for years. And we all concurred that this is going to heal and given the long list of potential health disasters, we should be grateful it’s not worse. And we are. 

 

But I guess she won’t be dancing at my party with the others. So it goes. 

 

Happy October! And watch where you step!