Better ways to fall.

From the first squalling breath time unfurls right out in front of you, your whole life. It's smaller than you'd think. You could live to be 120 and still time, rolled out in a swath of fabric in front of you, would be small. It's a strange, mutable fabric. For the first years of your life it circles 'round your mother and your father, and then it follows you to school and circles you there. You walk on it, the same swath of fabric, over and over.

And sometimes your feet get heavy when the weight of the world is too much, and your heels drag and the swath gets worn. Eventually. Eventually your little allotment of time is worn through with holes, so that when you walk back over the spot, even a year later, your feet catch in the threads. You might fall. You might hurt yourself. But you pick yourself up and never recognize that the pain you dragged along when you were 10 did some significant damage to your little swath of time. You're going to trip over it forever.

You can learn, eventually. You can skip over that hole. You can patch it with things you can't hold in your hands. With love, with understanding, with compassion. You can patch it with things you do hold in your hands: things you buy, things you can consume.

But the hole is still there, and sometimes you still fall. And maybe this is the pessimistic view, but that's the point, isn't it? Because people aren't really meant to fly. So we keep walking, and we keep walking, and we find better ways to fall, and faster ways to pick ourselves up again.