Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life - Hardcover

Simmons, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0553802666 ISBN 13: 9780553802665

Publisher: Bantam, 2002

Synopsis

Now I find myself in late August, with the nights cool and the crickets thick in the fields. Already the first blighted leaves glow scarlet on the red maples. It’s a season of fullness and sweet longings made sweeter now by the fact that I can’t be sure I’ll see this time of the year again....
— from Learning to Fall

Philip Simmons was just thirty-five years old in 1993 when he learned that he had ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and was told he had less than five years to live. As a young husband and father, and at the start of a promising literary career, he suddenly had to learn the art of dying. Nine years later, he has succeeded, against the odds, in learning the art of living.

Now, in this surprisingly joyous and spirit-renewing book, he chronicles his search for peace and his deepening relationship with the mystery of everyday life.

Set amid the rugged New Hampshire mountains he once climbed, and filled with the bustle of family life against the quiet progression of illness, Learning to Fall illuminates the journey we all must take — “the work of learning to live richly in the face of loss.”

From our first faltering steps, Simmons says, we may fall into disappointment or grief, fall into or out of love, fall from youth or health. And though we have little choice as to the timing or means of our descent, we may, as he affirms, “fall with grace, to grace.”

With humor, hard-earned wisdom and a keen eye for life’s lessons — whether drawn from great poetry or visits to the town dump — Simmons shares his discovery that even at times of great sorrow we may find profound freedom. And by sharing the wonder of his daily life, he offers us the gift of connecting more deeply and joyously with our own.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Simmons is associate professor of English at Lake Forest College in Illinois, where he taught literature and creative writing for nine years before being disabled. His literary scholarship has been published widely and his short fiction has appeared in Playboy, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, and the Massachusetts Review, among other magazines. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and two children.

From the Back Cover

“Sometimes there is no difference between a book and a blessing. In Philip Simmons has blessed us all.”
— Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., author of Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather’s Blessings

“Pure poetry, tinged with irony and humor, in the voice of a present-day Thoreau whose Walden is his family, the landscape of New Hampshire, and a young body fading away. A deeply moving rhapsody on inhabiting the human condition.”
— Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Full Catastrophe Living and Wherever You Go, There You Are

“Philip Simmons writes with clarity and a passion for honesty, laced with wit. An extraordinary book.”
— Elaine Pagels, Princeton University, author of The Gnostic Gospels

“Generous and genuine, like water from a deep well, halfway between a meditation and a dance, this book is an act of grace.”
— Jack Kornfield, author of A Path With Heart and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

“Learning to Fall is for anyone who loves life — or needs to love it more.... A wonderful achievement.”
— Balfour Mount, M.D., Professor of Palliative Medicine, McGill University

“Not only has Philip Simmons figured out the meaning of life for himself; with prodigious literary grace he has figured out how to tell us too. Required reading for Basic Humanity 101.”
— Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, author of Invisible Lines of Connection

From the Inside Flap

find myself in late August, with the nights cool and the crickets thick in the fields. Already the first blighted leaves glow scarlet on the red maples. It s a season of fullness and sweet longings made sweeter now by the fact that I can t be sure I ll see this time of the year again....
from Learning to Fall

Philip Simmons was just thirty-five years old in 1993 when he learned that he had ALS, or Lou Gehrig s disease, and was told he had less than five years to live. As a young husband and father, and at the start of a promising literary career, he suddenly had to learn the art of dying. Nine years later, he has succeeded, against the odds, in learning the art of living.

Now, in this surprisingly joyous and spirit-renewing book, he chronicles his search for peace and his deepening relationship with the mystery of everyday life.

Set amid the rugged New Hampshire mountains he once climbed, and filled with t

Reviews

Living fully in the face of a debilitating fatal illness is the challenge Simmons, then an associate professor of English at Lake Forest College in Illinois, faced when he was told in 1993 he had ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and had less than five years to live. As his illness progressed, a wheelchair-bound Simmons moved with his wife and two children to southern New Hampshire, near the rugged mountains he once had climbed. Writing in his cabin in view of an old dump, Simmons describes the wonders of nature remembered and still visible from his abode. He tells of his search for life's meaning in a variety of religious and secular texts, among them the story of Jesus, the philosophy of Zen, Sufi and Buddhist masters, medieval Christian mystics, Emerson's essays and the poetry of Yeats. In a wry disclaimer, Simmons notes that learning to live richly in the face of loss is a highly individual undertaking, and adds, "I'm not in the business of issuing directives, offering tips, imposing lists of spiritual dos and don'ts, or providing neat, comforting formulas." Indeed, his little book of thoughtful essays offers no easy solutions to dealing with suffering and sorrow, but it does chronicle how the experience of living at the edge can become an extraordinary connection to the eternal. Agent, Bob Markel. (Jan. 9)Forecast: Few books on loss and death manage to break out to a mass audience, but Bantam's promised publicity and advertising campaign may help this well-written chronicle of a spiritual journey make a strong showing in the marketplace. Xlibris published it last year to much acclaim.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

*Starred Review* Sometimes it takes a tragedy to make us realize how much we have and how much we have lost. In 1993 Simmons, then 35, was told that he had ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease. He was shaken but took it in stride. "Life, after all," he wryly observes, "is a terminal condition." Now he is in the delicate position of having to master the art of living and the art of dying. He has succeeded admirably so far by accepting failure and embracing human imperfection. Moreover, he is a wonderful writer. In the dozen essays of this slim volume, which are reflections on the secret of living well despite confronting seemingly insurmountable obstacles, he teaches not only how to fall with grace, but how to fall to grace, often with ecumenical overtones. He doesn't recite familiar, shallow platitudes or list any spiritual do's and don'ts. Instead he shows how to be willing to let go of the things that one finds most precious. In effect, his faith is a mysticism of everyday life: he seeks eternity wherever he can find it. One's life may be fleeting, he reminds us, but we are all part of a greater mystery. Full of many moments of quiet grace and subtle insight, Learning to Fall may become a spiritual classic--deservedly. June Sawyers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Stricken with Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS) at age 35, Simmons left his position as a professor of English to return to his native New Hampshire. The author of numerous articles and one previous book, he has crafted essays out of his reflections, understanding, and observations of everyday rural life. Interwoven throughout is Simmons's theme of letting go as a necessary means of embracing life. With a knack for blending the esoteric and the mundane, Simmons presents his own insight into the well-known messages of Western and Eastern spiritual masters, such as Rumi, the Dalai Lama, Thomas Merton, Thich Nhat Hahn, and Meister Eckhart. As a family man with a degenerative disease, he writes with a marvelous understanding of acceptance, always knowing that tomorrow you still have to do the laundry. Eschewing the saccharine found in other works of this kind, these engaging essays are recommended for public libraries. Andy Wickens, King Cty. P.L., WA

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Learning to Fall

Because I've spent the happier parts of my life at the southern edge of New Hampshire's White Mountains, two peaks rule my imagination: Mount Washington for its sheer size, its record winds and killing weather, and Mount Chocorua for its noble profile and for the legend of the defiant Pequawket Indian chief who leaped to his death from its summit, cursing the white men who had pursued him there.

I climbed Chocorua many times as a boy, and from the time of our courtship, my wife and I counted a hike to its summit as one of our annual rituals. On one such hike we made the romantic and wildly impractical decision to build a seasonal home here in New Hampshire, the place of my boyhood summers, over a thousand miles away from the Midwestern flatlands where we live and work most of the year.

On the same hike, incidentally, I talked a teenage boy out of jumping off the large angular boulder that perches just a few yards down from the summit on the east side. The boy had climbed atop the rock, about the size of a one-car garage, and then could not quite bring himself to climb down again. As he was on the point of leaping, encouraged by his friends below, I summoned my best classroom voice and said, "Don't do that." I then talked him down the way he had come up. In the back of my mind I was thinking that this young man was not cut out for Chief Chocorua's fate.

Barring a miracle, I'll not climb Chocorua again. It's been almost four years since I was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, a degenerative and ultimately fatal neurological condition with no effective treatment and no cure. In that time, I've managed to finish climbing all forty-eight of the New Hampshire peaks above four thousand feet, a task begun at age six with my first ascent of Mount Washington. Now, however, my legs won't go the distance, and I must content myself with the lesser triumphs of getting on my socks in the morning and making it down the stairs.

On the day last summer when I began writing this essay, my wife, Kathryn, and our seven-year-old son, Aaron, were climbing Mount Washington without me. Unable to join them in body, I did a quick search of the Web and found a live view from a camera mounted on the observatory at the summit. Pointed north, the camera showed the darkly hunched peaks of the northern Presidential Range beneath blue sky. Another click of the mouse gave me the current weather conditions. A near perfect July day: visibility eighty miles, wind at thirty-five miles per hour, temperature forty-two degrees. Satisfied that my wife and son would experience the summit at its best, I then set out to discover, in their honor, what it might be possible to say about climbing, and not climbing. About remaining upright, and learning to fall.

Actors and stuntmen learn to fall: as kids we watched them leap from moving trains and stagecoaches. I have a dim memory of an eighth-grade acting class in which I was taught to fall, but I can't remember the technique. Athletes learn to fall, and most people who have played sports have at some point had a coach tell them how to dive and roll, an art I never mastered. Devotees of the martial arts learn to fall, as do dancers and rock climbers. Mostly, though, we learn to do it badly.

My earliest memory: I'm standing alone at the top of the stairs, looking down, scared. I call for my mother, but she doesn't come. I grip the banister and look down: I have never done this on my own before. It's the first conscious decision of my life. On some level I must know that by doing this I'm becoming something new: I am becoming an "I." The memory ends here: my hand gripping the rail above my head, one foot launched into space.

Forty years later, encroaching baldness has made it easier to see the scars I gained from that adventure. Still, I don't regret it. One has to start somewhere. Is not falling, as much as climbing, our birthright? In the Christian theology of the fall, we all suffer the fall from grace, the fall from our primordial connectedness with God. My little tumble down the stairs was my own expulsion from the Garden: ever after I have been falling forward and down into the scarred years of conscious life, falling into the knowledge of pain, grief, and loss.

We have all suffered, and will suffer, our own falls. The fall from youthful ideals, the waning of physical strength, the failure of a cherished hope, the loss of our near and dear, the fall into injury or sickness, and late or soon, the fall to our certain ends. We have no choice but to fall, and little say as to the time or the means.

Perhaps, however, we do have some say in the manner of our falling. That is, perhaps we have a say in matters of style. As kids we all played the game of leaping from a diving board or dock, and before hitting the water striking some outrageous or goofy pose: ax-murderer, Washington crossing the Delaware, rabid dog. Maybe it comes to no more than this. But I'd like to think that learning to fall is more than merely a matter of posing, more than an opportunity to play it for laughs. In fact, I would have it that in the way of our falling we have the opportunity to express our essential humanity.

There's a well-known Zen parable about the man who was crossing a field when he saw a tiger charging at him. The man ran, but the tiger gained on him, chasing him toward the edge of a cliff. When he reached the edge, the man had no choice but to leap. He had one chance to save himself: a scrubby branch growing out of the side of the cliff about halfway down. He grabbed the branch and hung on. Looking down, what did he see on the ground below? Another tiger.

Then the man saw that a few feet off to his left a small plant grew out of the cliff, and from it there hung one ripe strawberry. Letting go with one hand he found that he could stretch his arm out just far enough to pluck the berry with his fingertips and bring it to his lips.

How sweet it tasted!

I'm sure we've all found ourselves in this predicament.

I found myself in it summer before last, halfway up the rock slide on the north peak of Mount Tripyramid. The north slide of Tripyramid is a mile of slick granite slabs and loose gravel partially grown over with scrubby spruce and birch on a pitch as steep as the roof of your house. I had done this hike as a boy, in canvas sneakers and long pants, but had not remembered how hard it was.

Earlier that summer my weakening, wobbly legs had managed to get me up Chocorua with only a little trouble on the upper ledges. But here they had failed me. I had already fallen twice, bruising ribs, gashing knees, mashing one elbow to pulp. Standing there looking out over the valley, my legs shook and each breath brought pain. I had been in tight spots in the mountains before, but this was the closest I had ever felt to the entire wretched business of litters, rescue teams, and emergency vehicles. I looked out at the mountains because they were the only thing I could look at. The view down the slope at my feet was terrifying, the view up at the climb ahead intolerable.

Tigers either way.

In such a situation, one looks for blessings. As I stood there in pain looking neither up nor down but out across the valley to where granite peaks rose against a turbulent sky, I counted among my blessings the fact that it wasn't raining. The steep rock slide, treacherous as it was now, would be deadly when wet. I had other blessings to count, as well. Three years into the course of an illness that kills most people in four or five, I belonged, statistically speaking, in a wheelchair, not on the side of a mountain. I was happy to be standing anywhere, and especially happy, all things considered, to be standing here, in my beloved White Mountains, looking out over miles of forested wilderness.

There was, however, that turbulent sky. Fact was, rain had been threatening all day. Those of you who have never stood in a high place and watched a rainstorm move toward you across a valley have missed one of the things the words awesome and majestic were invented to describe. You're never quite sure you're seeing the rain itself: just a gray haze trailing below clouds drifting slow and steady as high sailed ships. Beautiful, yes, but in my present circumstances I felt something more than beauty. Seeing such a storm come at me now across that vast space I felt the astonishment of the sublime, which Edmund Burke defined in the eighteenth century as "not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror." It was as though I had been privileged with a glimpse of my own death, and found it the most terrible and beautiful thing I had ever seen.

I suppose I could stop here and wrap all this up with a neat moral. I could give out the sort of advice you find in the magazines sold at the grocery store. You know what I mean. I've done my share of grocery shopping, and like all red-blooded American dads I reward myself by reading the women's magazines in the checkout line. Seems I can't get enough of "Three Weeks to Thinner Thighs," and "Ten Successful Men Tell What They Really Want in Bed." And I've always gotten my best parenting advice from Working Mother magazine. The articles in Working Mother follow a rigid formula: start with a catchy anecdote, then trot out an appropriately credentialed expert on whatever problem the anecdote was meant to illustrate--the whiny child, the fussy eater--then let the expert get down to the business of dishing out nuggets of advice set off in the text with bullet points. The formula is comforting and efficient. You know just what's coming, and if you're in a hurry you can skip the anecdote and credentials and get right to the bullet points.

I could do the same thing with the stories I've told so far. Surely the story of the tigers and my escapade on Mount Tripyramid yield nuggets of advice worthy of a bullet point or two:

-Don't wait for a tragedy to start appreciating the little things i...

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0553802666
• ISBN 13: 9780553802665
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176