Precipice

You know the way water rushes just above the head of a waterfall, headlong, unawares, powerless to do anything differently, thundering, powdering, obliterating itself, from solid to mist on its helpless, yet beautiful way from top to bottom? It is how I feel. A month to move from our house of 17 years; a month to relocate to a house with heat; a month to vacate a summer camp before its pipes turn icy. It is like the slow-motion reliving of a car crash, or watching a bad boat landing at a dock. You can see it coming, a mile away, and all you can do, sometimes, is watch the accident unfold, a Titanic and iceberg sort of thing. I hope this is not a case getting what I have mistakenly wished for. I hope that rather than instant atomization on the rocks, we--my family--will be in for a soft landing soon, just like the time I fell from a tree top and was caught in a mesh of grape vines before I hit the ground. Imagine, there I was, excited and climbing down as quickly as I could to see my parents, just arrived from a vacation in Europe, and instead of saved, lying broken on the ground, or worse? Imagine my parents' great sadness. That was but one among many such strokes of great good fortune. As I grew older, I came to rely--probably more than I ought to have--upon such deus ex machina to keep me out of trouble. Whether it was another climbing escape, this time three floors down a friends' house on length of laundry line, blistering my hands badly before crashing into the shrubbery, or the beneficence of a paternal Frenchman in Davos who lent me shelter and food for a few days, or help from another friend with sufficient money to lend in time of unemployment, or a final look before darting across interstate traffic, an eighteen wheeler going 75 only a foot away, unnoticed in its vastness, or just the blessings of good health while uninsured, I have flirted with altogether too many virtual precipices, a cat with many, many lives. Time for Change is a time for me to step away from such uncertain living, to move back and build upon more solid ground. I have been living on a fault line, gambling. It is a time to be wise after so much foolishness. But here is the rub: I am only me. I am what I am and can extend upon my experience? How can I become sage after a life of jestering? Can a fool be wise? I do not know these answeres, except I will listen, more than I have ever done before. I do not trust the precipice; I do not like the precarious situation. I do not want to walk the cliff any longer, and I never want to fall! For the first time, I look in the mirror and see fear. I realize how everything, but for some sort of grace, could change in a single, catastrophic moment. I shake my head and clear these awful thoughts from the head that has created them.