Finding Meaning in the Meaningless

Man never legislates, but destinies and accidents, happening in all sorts of
ways, legislate in all sorts of ways. ~ Plato

I was walking out of 50 Penn Place. My wife and son were with me. We’d just visited the Full Circle Bookstore. It was bright outside as we emerged from inside the building. I took my glasses case out of my pocket. I’m trying to slow the growth of cataracts with a consistent use of sunglasses. I was in the process of switching between my regular glasses to my prescription sunglasses when I failed to see that step from the building to the parking lot. I was distracted. My focus was divided between walking and glasses transfer.

The step was a little bigger than I expected, and when my right foot took on my weight and there was no step beneath it, the foot went down to the blacktop, my center of balance was worse than it would have been had the step not been so deep and that is what turned a stumble into a fall.

Next I did that DON’T LET ME FALL dance. I threw myself into flailing contortions, but instead of helping, it seemed to put me even further out of balance. I sensed that recovery was impossible.

In about two-tenths of a second I was sprawled on the asphalt of the parking lot. On the way down I had time to think, “I have two knee replacements, and a shoulder replacement. I sure hope they don’t shatter from this fall.”

With no conscious effort, no cognitive command from my brain, my left hand moved forward to break my fall. My left pinky finger did all it could to slow down all 260 pounds of me as I fell. It wasn’t enough, so the rest of the impact was absorbed by my head. My head hit the blacktop right at the hinge of my glasses and my left eye socket. My body crushed my glasses case.

Then the fall was over. I looked up and saw that the glasses I had been wearing were bent oddly. I had pain in my left hand and wrist. I didn’t want to fall in front of my son. Ryan lives in New Jersey and so he can’t really monitor me that well so far away. A fall like this will make him think he has a tottering old guy as a dad. I feared he would think he had a dad who falls all the time. It turned out that that is exactly what he thought.. I don’t want him worrying about me. I was embarrassed by the fall.

The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances. ~Aristotle

In literature a fall always means something. When Phoebe is on that merry-go-round at the end of the Catcher in the Rye it symbolized something. A fall from innocence maybe. Even the title was from an image in Holden Caulfield’s brain where kids would be playing Red Rover in a Rye field located near a cleft, but he, Holden, would catch the children before they could FALL over the edge. There was that famous fall in A Separate Peace.

But life is not literature. Literature is not a reflection of real life, but an invention, a myth written to convey something in the mind of the myth maker. My fall was part of mundane, ordinary daily life. There is a big difference in a young man and an old man. Young men sing in the shower while old guys look down and think, "I should put some of those glue down treads there to keep me from falling." A fall is part of life. Thousands of people tumble off steps, over curbs, over a wrinkle in the an area rug, over a dog that was sleeping, but decides to arise just as its owner’s foot is in mid-step. I want my life to be meaningful every second. Piped in music in the mall makes me feel like I’m the protagonist in a movie and the music I’m hearing is from the sound track.

It’s not true. It was just a fall. I keep trying to make this tumble mean something. I search for clues. If life is important then every part of life is important, isn’t it? But why look for meaning in a life event that is basically meaningless. Maybe most of what happens to us is meaningless. Maybe everything is meaningless. Every fall, and every recovery from a fall, every war, and every negotiated peace and all that happens to humans, and every human act is just a bunch of stuff that happens.

Marge: The moral of this story is a good deed is its own reward.

Bart: Hey, we got a reward. The head is cool!

Marge: Well then... I guess the moral is no good deed goes unrewarded.

Homer: Wait a minute! If I hadn't written that nasty letter, we wouldn't have gotten anything!

Marge: Well... then I guess the moral is the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Lisa: Perhaps there is no moral to this story.

Homer: Exactly! It's just a bunch of stuff that happened.

Marge: But it certainly was a memorable few days.

Homer: Amen to that!