Saturday afternoon. It’s a bright and sunny day. The air is a balmy forty degrees. Everything outside screams of spring. So much so, it’s incredibly easy to forget that, mere hours earlier, the ground had been covered with snow and ice.
I step out my door, ready for a run. Maybe “ready” is too strong a word. I was hesitant in my apartment. I don’t have time for as long a run as I’d hoped, but I figure some is better than none. I’m a little too in my head about the whole thing, but sometimes you just have to do things even when you’re not quite feeling it. Regardless, I’m about to get started.
I begin, running down the street to the first intersection of the run about a hundred meters from my front door. The traffic light is on my side as I reach the crosswalk. I continue to the other side of the street and take a right. Immediately as I turn, however, I realize, “That’s not the route I want to take.”
Without hesitation, without a single thought for the icy reality of hours prior, I correct course. My head turns first, as is the case with all sharp turns, and my body follows suit. Now, even though my line of sight tells me I’m back on track, my feet can find no traction. I’m continuing in the same direction I was before I turned, even as I look to where I want to go.
Everything happens rapidly after that. The next thing I know, I’m committed to a merciless trust fall with the ground. My left side takes the brunt of the impact, but my right knee is not spared. Some of my weight comes down on my water bottle, turning it into a squirt gun as the pressure evacuates much of its contents. I packed some slices of cucumber into a pouch on the side of the water bottle, too. Those are surely puree now. As I stand, quickly regaining my bearings, I discover my phone’s new makeover. Broken windows have a nice aesthetic, right?
The corpse of my shattered pride lies motionless on the ground where I landed, dead on impact. He won’t be joining me for the rest of the run. The fall took place right next to a bus loading and unloading passengers, pedestrians amble about in the crisp, sunny air, weekend revelers all around must have seen my graceful display. No way to play this cool so I flee the scene immediately.
All this takes a decent amount of page space to say, but the turnaround on the event itself is incredibly fast. The whole thing takes fewer than three seconds start to finish…or perhaps I should say, start to restart.
I continue on my way, embarrassed and in a great deal of pain. After about fifty feet, though, the shock wears off. Suddenly, I find that I’m laughing. For the rest of the run, it’s impossible to take myself (or anything else for that matter) seriously. Frequent bouts of laughter punctuated by shit eating grins come and go for the remainder of my run.
It takes several blocks for my knees to get used to motion. Every time I have to stop and wait for a light to change, my knees remember how badly they hurt and it takes even longer to get back to a state of flow. I have to cut my run short for the sake of my broken body, but I’m not even mad.
****
Once I kissed the pavement, you see, any semblance of dignity disappeared without a trace. With no dignity to hide behind, my inhibitions had nothing on me. I’ve not enjoyed a run as much as that one for a very long time.
All this led me to a simple conclusion: eat shit first. Get it out of the way. Once the worst happens, any subsequent misfortune will be enjoyable, if only by contrast. The catch is a tricky one, though. You really can’t plan to eat shit first. Planning embarrassment or pain allows you to prepare for it and if you’re prepared for such things, even if you really do manage to feel them, the experience won’t be genuine.
So you have to get the worst out of the way first, but you can’t plan for the worst or else it won’t work. While this may not be practical as an intention, as a reaction it certainly is. Maybe the idea is to always remind yourself, always maintain awareness, that you’re not immune to anything.
If one is perpetually ready and willing to accept his or her failings (or fallings, as it were) without judgment, brushing them off and having a laugh about it as you might after a minor misunderstanding, then moving forward becomes easier. If the fall is bad enough, forward motion will still hurt like hell, but the worst is past and you weren’t all that dignified to begin with.
In essence, take yourself seriously until you can’t and don’t be afraid to laugh when you rediscover your own absurdity.