Traction

I wrote this on the train ... sometime before the new year.  I just didn't get around to typing it up before the fearless hit prime time.  Just to clue you in to the time line, so you don't think I'm too crazy.
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In my ear, the headphones, you know, I hear: "I'm on a train bound destiny..."  Think she knows I am really on a train??
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If I were going to rewrite the words to the Rolling Stones song about satisfaction, it would definitely say... "I can't get no traction."

You can see that I'm not musically inclined, so it wouldn't actually work out.

Anyway, it would be a true statement regardless.

I can't get no traction...

I fall down, slip, slide -- literally and metaphorically -- on a regular basis.

I wonder sometimes if the falling down is the universe trying to tell me something.

I remember, I guess fall (no pun intended, really) 2010, I was rushing across campus to a meeting and I flew out of my shoes, literally.  I landed hard on the side walk.  My shoes back where I my body left them before I went airborne.  I was sprawled like a bad superman impression on the ground.

Yeah, picture it.

I didn't trip -- I just fell.

People around me stopped, to gawk and to ask if I was okay; but before anyone could help me, I was up and dusting myself off -- bleeding from wounds and shaking perhaps more out of embarrassment and shock.  I just kept rushing to the meeting.

It wasn't the first time I fell like that -- or the last.

But it was spectacularly public, perhaps making it all the more memorable.

Usually, I fall in the privacy of my own home -- or when I am too drunk to care who has seen me -- or I don't remember it at all -- just find the bruises later and have a vague, dream-like memory of getting too up close and personal with some pavement.

So, let's see... I fall when the floor is wet.  I can hardly stand if it's icy.  But, I also just fall -- for no reason.

I can't get no traction.

It feels like the rug being pulled out -- and that's why it feels like a message.

I always assume it's a "don't get too big for your britches" or, a softer "don't get ahead of yourself."

I could even contemplate it being a "just slow down."

Though there have to be less painless ways to get my attention.

My meditation training should be able to convince me that it is just life -- happening as it does -- to stop taking it personally.

But that is a lesson I am still trying to assimilate -- who knows if I will ever master it.

And if my issues with traction ended in the physical realm, perhaps I would just accept that it's just the way it works for me -- like the clumsy thing -- have I ever written about that?  If not, that's for another day.

No, worse than falling down is feeling like I can't get traction in life.  I barely hang on by the tips of my nails sometimes.

Yeah...

I can't get no traction...

[thinking no photos necessary for this one ...]