Photo by Padmapani L. Perez
Every month, the Agam Agenda shares a letter from someone in our team: a personal message toward shaping kinder futures. Read the letter for June 2022 by Padmapani L. Perez, our Lead Strategist for Creative Collaboration.
When was the last time you fell down? Or almost fell but caught yourself?
I fell and hit my face on the ground a few weeks ago. The mark from it is still on my left cheek. Sometimes I study its slow fade in the mirror. I follow where it leads my thoughts.
It had been a while since I last found myself flat on the ground. There was a time you might have said I courted Falling: scrambling across scree on a steep mountainside, flying off my mountain bike and getting the wind knocked out of me on impact, slipping and sliding along a muddy path, hanging from a limestone lip with only my toes and fingertips keeping me from swinging out on the rope, feeling the galloping horse beneath me slip and lose his balance on the concrete road.
Lately I began nursing the idea that the past two years’ pandemic, lockdowns, economic shocks, and painful personal losses were part of one long horrible fall. The promise of stepping through a portal, crossing a threshold, didn’t materialize. We’re all falling, I thought, and the election result was the final plunge into darkness.
Then I actually fell. It was a small accident but the sheer physicality of it brought my grand metaphor tumbling down. Falling put me completely in the grip of my body, in the pull of gravity. At the same time, a jumble of thoughts raced through me. Save my eyeglasses! Grab hold of something! Don’t freeze! Relax! Help! Was it the root? Wrong rock! Why are these plants here? Oh no, more pine needles! I’m still slipping! I don’t want to get hurt! Thought is quicker than light indeed but not always illuminating.
There is an end to falling: we eventually land somewhere. The moment of the fall itself can be frightening. It stretches and compresses time in weird ways, but a fall reminds us, to paraphrase Yewande Omotoso in Harvest Moon, that we are bodies the way others are bodies, too. Falling hurts, in more ways than one. Quick reflexes won’t always save you. Falling puts you in your Place—in more ways than one. We’re reminded that we’re not invincible, we don’t control things, and sometimes we’re simply not paying attention. And we’re reminded that you don’t just lie there when you fall. You get up, with much-needed help and care from others.
No, we’re not plunging through darkness in one long fall. I was wrong about that. We’re catching one another’s many falls, we’re helping each other get up again and again. Falling is intense but it’s also fleeting. When you fall, you feel the Place where you land, you feel the parts of your body touching the place where you land. You. Feel. Before and after the fall is the long duration of living, of the mundane. Mundane as in Mundus. Mundus as in World, the world in which we endure through daily acts of care.
Sometimes I pass the place I fell and I pause to look around. I wonder if I left any traces of DNA on the pavement where I skinned my cheek. A carpenter bee hums past. How silly of me to seek out some mark of my fall in the place where so much else—so much living!—goes on. The patch of carabao grass I flattened no longer shows signs of our meeting. I’m glad.
