There are periods of time that are just hard. You feel yourself being pushed and pulled, or you feel like your spinning your wheels. You learn to pull loose ends together quickly, because you so easily find yourself off track.
You know you could be doing everything better—if you only chose to put the most important things first. But you’re getting along, so you waste an hour here or there on things that probably don’t matter.
And then, something unexpected comes up, and you find yourself with very little control, and very few choices. So many things catch up with you, which doesn’t make sense, because you were the one who was actually behind.
All of these kinds of things occur to you when you get hurt or really sick. You understand that with a few exceptions, you spend most of your time living for expediency, and less of it for solid meaning.
Last year, I quietly told myself that I wasn’t going to let so many things come first before the important things. I wasn’t going to let everything else come before writing. I started picking at it again, like a fork tine lifting crust on a slice of pie. It wasn’t enough to amount to anything, but it did remind me that at one point, I had a path.
I got lucky, because someone else invited me to join her writing path, and it kept me from failing myself as I think I would have otherwise.
I didn’t make a secret pact with myself this year—no magnanimous resolutions or announcements to the world that I would get any of my acts together. Mostly, it’s easier not to break the promises we don’t make.
It’s probably better that I didn’t even quietly converse with myself about time ticking away, and the outrageous privilege of frittering it away—even though my current day job is tough, and I do believe that some wasted time isn’t actually wasted at all.
It ends up that at the beginning of this year, things have spun out of control early. My dearest lifelong friend is at the beginning of a fight for her life. Just thinking the words in that sentence makes me want to shut down for a while, because words have power, and who isn’t stopped in their tracks by a punch in the gut like that?
Living in this world, there are a thousand things to occupy your thoughts and your time. They live on a spectrum of importance, and moments both magnify and dull them. It feels like a million years has passed in the few weeks since everything in my friend’s life changed forever. I am at a standstill while the branches of her universe are swept past me in a raging current, and I am powerless. But my own powerlessness is of no significance. If I had anything, it would be hers in a heartbeat.
We can’t control each other’s storms or paths. And sometimes, we even fail to control our own. That takes me back to the idea of failing to put the right things first. Sometimes, the choices seem obvious, and sometimes we think the impact of our choices is clear.
That’s not always the case.
Getting off the path can become a big problem—especially when it’s a habit. Sometimes, we get distracted. There’s something that seems worth looking at more closely. Sometimes, we think we’re doing the right thing. Most of the time, the path is a metaphor, and there is no urgency about the situation—just marks along the way to remind us of where we are in relation to where we thought we were going. But sometimes, the metaphor becomes real.
I have a bad habit of stepping aside for other people, because deep down, I don’t think the space I occupy is as important as that of others. Forever, my husband has told me to stand my ground when we are out places together, and someone walks toward me, as if I’m not even there—as if I am invisible. I pretty much always step aside to let the other person pass, because I don’t believe they will go around me. How can someone go around a person they don’t see?
A week ago, stepping aside for someone who was heading the wrong direction cost me. I fell down hard, and broke my arm in multiple places. I knew it was broken as soon as I hit the ground. The woman walking the wrong way came back to where I lay fallen on the ground and clutching my mangled arm against my chest. She said nothing. I knew she was there, and I could have been angry, but even though she hadn’t been in the right, I also had been in the wrong. I had put myself in harm’s way by putting her place on the path ahead of my own.
I have reasoned with myself that I had to let her pass—she was an elderly woman. It would have been wrong for me to play sidewalk chicken with an old lady in the forest, in the dark. But the truth is, I would have stepped aside for anyone.
A million times I have done the same thing. Now, I am recovering from surgery. I have a plate and screws holding the broken bits together, and I am in more physical pain than I have ever been. Everything in our life is completely out of sync and out of my control. I feel like a fool.
Now, you may be thinking that I shouldn’t be taking this situation so seriously, and that beating myself up about it isn’t going to help. Maybe those are valid points. Maybe I’m just stuck in the moment and it reminds me of how wasteful I can be with time, freedom, autonomy, and passion. Now, here I sit, barely able to take care of myself, let alone manage anything else. Maybe I feel like I should be stronger, and that instead of letting a quiet feeling of “less than” knock me down, I should realize that letting myself be knocked down doesn’t just affect me.
Right now, it’s a few bones that have been forced back into alignment in a very painful way that has my family and me off track, and me unable to be with my friend when she needs me. But when I look deeper, I am always allowing things to get me off track and to hijack things that are important.
It’s not easy to put yourself first. It’s not easy to stay on your own path when life comes at you. And like it or not, sometimes you are only reminded of your own value when you put the wrong things ahead of yourself and you find yourself flat on your back with no other choice.
Sometimes, looking at yourself and realizing how prone to self-sabotage you are is just as important as helping someone else. Maybe it’s not someone else’s path you should be clearing. Maybe it’s time to get out of your own way.
