Blessings of an Imperfect Life
by Philip
Simmons
 Because I've spent
the happier parts of my life at the southern edge of New Hampshire's White
Mountains, two peaks rule my imagination: Mount Washington for its sheer
size, its record winds and killing weather, and Mount Chocorua for its
noble profile and for the legend of the defiant Pequawket Indian chief who
leaped to his death from its summit, cursing the white men who had pursued
him there.
I climbed Chocorua many times as a boy, and from the
time of our courtship, my wife and I counted a hike to its summit as one
of our annual rituals. On one such hike we made the romantic and wildly
impractical decision to build a seasonal home here in New Hampshire, the
place of my boyhood summers, over a thousand miles away from the
Midwestern flatlands where we live and work most of the year.
On
the same hike, incidentally, I talked a teenage boy out of jumping off the
large angular boulder that perches just a few yards down from the summit
on the east side. The boy had climbed atop the rock, about the size of a
one-car garage, and then could not quite bring himself to climb down
again. As he was on the point of leaping, encouraged by his friends below,
I summoned my best classroom voice and said, "Don't do that." I then
talked him down the way he had come up. In the back of my mind I was
thinking that this young man was not cut out for Chief Chocorua's
fate.
Barring a miracle, I'll not climb Chocorua again. It's been
almost four years since I was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, a
degenerative and ultimately fatal neurological condition with no effective
treatment and no cure. In that time, I've managed to finish climbing all
forty-eight of the New Hampshire peaks above four thousand feet, a task
begun at age six with my first ascent of Mount Washington. Now, however,
my legs won't go the distance, and I must content myself with the lesser
triumphs of getting on my socks in the morning and making it down the
stairs.
On the day last summer when I began writing this essay, my
wife, Kathryn, and our seven-year-old son, Aaron, were climbing Mount
Washington without me. Unable to join them in body, I did a quick search
of the Web and found a live view from a camera mounted on the observatory
at the summit. Pointed north, the camera showed the darkly hunched peaks
of the northern Presidential Range beneath blue sky. Another click of the
mouse gave me the current weather conditions. A near perfect July day:
visibility eighty miles, wind at thirty-five miles per hour, temperature
forty-two degrees. Satisfied that my wife and son would experience the
summit at its best, I then set out to discover, in their honor, what it
might be possible to say about climbing, and not climbing. About remaining
upright, and learning to fall.
Actors and stuntmen learn to fall:
as kids we watched them leap from moving trains and stagecoaches. I have a
dim memory of an eighth-grade acting class in which I was taught to fall,
but I can't remember the technique. Athletes learn to fall, and most
people who have played sports have at some point had a coach tell them how
to dive and roll, an art I never mastered. Devotees of the martial arts
learn to fall, as do dancers and rock climbers. Mostly, though, we learn
to do it badly.
My earliest memory: I'm standing alone at the top
of the stairs, looking down, scared. I call for my mother, but she doesn't
come. I grip the banister and look down: I have never done this on my own
before. It's the first conscious decision of my life. On some level I must
know that by doing this I'm becoming something new: I am becoming an "I."
The memory ends here: my hand gripping the rail above my head, one foot
launched into space.
Forty years later, encroaching baldness has
made it easier to see the scars I gained from that adventure. Still, I
don't regret it. One has to start somewhere. Is not falling, as much as
climbing, our birthright? In the Christian theology of the fall, we all
suffer the fall from grace, the fall from our primordial connectedness
with God. My little tumble down the stairs was my own expulsion from the
Garden: ever after I have been falling forward and down into the scarred
years of conscious life, falling into the knowledge of pain, grief, and
loss.
We have all suffered, and will suffer, our own falls. The
fall from youthful ideals, the waning of physical strength, the failure of
a cherished hope, the loss of our near and dear, the fall into injury or
sickness, and late or soon, the fall to our certain ends. We have no
choice but to fall, and little say as to the time or the
means.
Perhaps, however, we do have some say in the manner of our
falling. That is, perhaps we have a say in matters of style. As kids we
all played the game of leaping from a diving board or dock, and before
hitting the water striking some outrageous or goofy pose: ax-murderer,
Washington crossing the Delaware, rabid dog. Maybe it comes to no more
than this. But I'd like to think that learning to fall is more than merely
a matter of posing, more than an opportunity to play it for laughs. In
fact, I would have it that in the way of our falling we have the
opportunity to express our essential humanity.
There's a well-known
Zen parable about the man who was crossing a field when he saw a tiger
charging at him. The man ran, but the tiger gained on him, chasing him
toward the edge of a cliff. When he reached the edge, the man had no
choice but to leap. He had one chance to save himself: a scrubby branch
growing out of the side of the cliff about halfway down. He grabbed the
branch and hung on. Looking down, what did he see on the ground below?
Another tiger.
Then the man saw that a few feet off to his left a
small plant grew out of the cliff, and from it there hung one ripe
strawberry. Letting go with one hand he found that he could stretch his
arm out just far enough to pluck the berry with his fingertips and bring
it to his lips.
How sweet it tasted!
I'm sure we've all
found ourselves in this predicament.
I found myself in it summer
before last, halfway up the rock slide on the north peak of Mount
Tripyramid. The north slide of Tripyramid is a mile of slick granite slabs
and loose gravel partially grown over with scrubby spruce and birch on a
pitch as steep as the roof of your house. I had done this hike as a boy,
in canvas sneakers and long pants, but had not remembered how hard it was.
Earlier that summer my weakening, wobbly legs had managed to get
me up Chocorua with only a little trouble on the upper ledges. But here
they had failed me. I had already fallen twice, bruising ribs, gashing
knees, mashing one elbow to pulp. Standing there looking out over the
valley, my legs shook and each breath brought pain. I had been in tight
spots in the mountains before, but this was the closest I had ever felt to
the entire wretched business of litters, rescue teams, and emergency
vehicles. I looked out at the mountains because they were the only thing I
could look at. The view down the slope at my feet was terrifying, the view
up at the climb ahead intolerable.
Tigers either way.
In
such a situation, one looks for blessings. As I stood there in pain
looking neither up nor down but out across the valley to where granite
peaks rose against a turbulent sky, I counted among my blessings the fact
that it wasn't raining. The steep rock slide, treacherous as it was now,
would be deadly when wet. I had other blessings to count, as well. Three
years into the course of an illness that kills most people in four or
five, I belonged, statistically speaking, in a wheelchair, not on the side
of a mountain. I was happy to be standing anywhere, and especially happy,
all things considered, to be standing here, in my beloved White Mountains,
looking out over miles of forested wilderness.
There was, however,
that turbulent sky. Fact was, rain had been threatening all day. Those of
you who have never stood in a high place and watched a rainstorm move
toward you across a valley have missed one of the things the words awesome
and majestic were invented to describe. You're never quite sure you're
seeing the rain itself: just a gray haze trailing below clouds drifting
slow and steady as high sailed ships. Beautiful, yes, but in my present
circumstances I felt something more than beauty. Seeing such a storm come
at me now across that vast space I felt the astonishment of the sublime,
which Edmund Burke defined in the eighteenth century as "not pleasure, but
a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror."
It was as though I had been privileged with a glimpse of my own death, and
found it the most terrible and beautiful thing I had ever seen.
I
suppose I could stop here and wrap all this up with a neat moral. I could
give out the sort of advice you find in the magazines sold at the grocery
store. You know what I mean. I've done my share of grocery shopping, and
like all red-blooded American dads I reward myself by reading the women's
magazines in the checkout line. Seems I can't get enough of "Three Weeks
to Thinner Thighs," and "Ten Successful Men Tell What They Really Want in
Bed." And I've always gotten my best parenting advice from Working
Mother magazine. The articles in Working Mother follow a rigid
formula: start with a catchy anecdote, then trot out an appropriately
credentialed expert on whatever problem the anecdote was meant to
illustrate -- the whiny child, the fussy eater -- then let the expert get down
to the business of dishing out nuggets of advice set off in the text with
bullet points. The formula is comforting and efficient. You know just
what's coming, and if you're in a hurry you can skip the anecdote and
credentials and get right to the bullet points.
I could do the same
thing with the stories I've told so far. Surely the story of the tigers
and my escapade on Mount Tripyramid yield nuggets of advice worthy of a
bullet point or two:
- Don't wait for a tragedy to start
appreciating the little things in life. We shouldn't have to be chased by
tigers or leap off a cliff to savor the sweetness of a single
strawberry.
- Stop and smell the honeysuckle. Or at least for
goodness' sake stop and watch a rainstorm the next time you see
one.
- Count your blessings. Appreciate what you
have instead of complaining about what you don't
have.
Now, all of this is good
advice. But I'm not writing this to give advice. I'm writing, I suppose,
to say that life is not a problem to be solved. What do I mean by that?
Surely life presents us with problems. When I have a toothache, I try to
think rationally about its causes. I consider possible remedies, their
costs and consequences. I might consult an expert, in this case a dentist,
who is skilled in solving this particular sort of problem. And thus we get
through much of life.
As a culture we have accomplished a great
deal by seeing life as a set of problems to be solved. We have invented
new medicines, we have traveled to the moon, developed the computer on
which I am writing this essay. We learned our method from the Greeks. From
childhood on we are taught to be little Aristotles. We observe the world,
we break down what we see into its component parts. We perceive problems
and set about solving them, laying out our solutions in ordered sequences
like the instructions for assembling a child's bicycle. We have gotten so
good at this method that we apply it to everything, and so we have
magazine articles telling us the six ways to find a mate, the eight ways
to bring greater joy into your life, the ten elements of a successful
family, the twelve steps toward spiritual enlightenment. We choose to see
life as a technical matter.
And here is where we go wrong. For at
its deepest levels life is not a problem but a mystery. The distinction,
which I borrow from the philosopher
Gabriel Marcel, is fundamental:
problems are to be solved, true mysteries are not. Personally, I wish I
could have learned this lesson more easily -- without, perhaps, having to
give up my tennis game. But each of us finds his or her own way to
mystery. At one time or another, each of us confronts an experience so
powerful, bewildering, joyous, or terrifying that all our efforts to see
it as a "problem" are futile. Each of us is brought to the cliff's edge.
At such moments we can either back away in bitterness or confusion, or
leap forward into mystery. And what does mystery ask of us? Only that we
be in its presence, that we fully, consciously, hand ourselves over. That
is all, and that is everything. We can participate in mystery only by
letting go of solutions. This letting go is the first lesson of falling,
and the hardest.
I offer my stories not as illustrations of a
problem but as entrances into the mystery of falling. And now I'll offer
not advice, not bullet points, but mystery points, set off in my text not
with the familiar round dots but with question marks:
? If spiritual
growth is what you seek, don't ask for more strawberries, ask for more
tigers.
? The threat of the tigers, the leap from the cliff, are
what give the strawberry its savor. They cannot be avoided, and the
strawberry can't be enjoyed without them. No tigers, no
sweetness.
? In falling we somehow gain what means most. In falling
we are given back our lives even as we lose them.
My balance is not
so good these days, and a short time before I began work on this essay
last summer, I fell on the short path that leads through the woods from
our driveway to the compost pile. I had just helped my six-year-old
daughter into the car, and turned to start down the path, when I stumbled
and went down hard. I lay stunned for a few moments, face numb, lip
bleeding, chest bruised, my daughter, Amelia, standing over me asking,
quite reasonably, what I was doing down there and whether I was all right.
This
article was excerpted from:
 Learning to Fall
by Philip Simmons.
Excerpted by permission of Bantam, a
division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this
excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing
from the publisher. ©2002.
Info/Order
this book (paperback)
(hardcover)
About The
Author
Philip
Simmons was an associate professor of English at Lake Forest College in
Illinois, where he taught literature and creative writing for nine years
before being disabled. His literary scholarship has been published
widely and his short fiction has appeared in Playboy, TriQuarterly,
Ploughshares, and the Massachusetts Review, among other
magazines. He died from
complications due to ALS on July 27, 2002.
Visit his website at
http://www.learningtofall.com
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