The wind chilled my bare feet and the crisp air filled my lungs with a cool sensation, as I stood out on the back deck. The ground shimmered wet from the rain, and the sky spread out above me like a grey blanket, enveloping the day in its melancholy. My thoughts swirled like my hair in the wind, and I wondered a hundred things at once.
It's strange realizing that you've repeated a mistake- coming to an understanding, only to remember that you'd once stood in the same spot with the same thought. I thought I knew all these things- knew what to be careful of, what footholds to use to keep from falling- and yet here I was again, fallen from the same peak in the same way.
To say that the last month and a half of my life has been a massive roller coaster is a significant understatement. I have made sizable mistakes and screwed myself over in more ways than one. When I finally figured out how to cut out the drama, the damage had already been done.
Allow me to elucidate: I got myself into a bad relationship, and the end result was a trip to an in-patient program to help recover my sanity. Of course, it's a hundred times more complicated than that, but, for the purpose of this exercise, that's the jist of it.
It's funny, in the end I realized that I was simply relearning lessons that I had already learned in life, and that caught me off guard. Ultimately, though, this lead me to an entirely new epiphany: lessons learned are not always lessons remembered.
They say that time heals all wounds, and what I've realized over the past couple of weeks is that sometimes time also makes you forget what you had once learned from those wounds- and why you learned it. To me, this makes it all the more important that we remember how to get up when we fall: because we will fall, again and again.
Life is a long line of falls, but if we get up more times than we fall, we will always win the battle.
"Get knocked down, get back up."- Octavia of the Tree People.
