Tying Your Shoes

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Surviving suffering is kinda like tying our shoes.

The first few times, people older and wiser help us out. They teach us the ropes, just the way others taught them. Step A, Step B, then Step C, so that we can walk on our naïve feet. We think we’ve mastered it and do it for awhile on our own. We shoo the wiser away when they offer to help, proud of our own self-sufficiency.

Then something happens where a vital part of our well-rehearsed process is stripped from us, a cut so deep we can’t seem to do anything without intense pain overwhelming our every move.

Gradually, we heal and learn once more how to go through the motions. We do the minimum, just enough to get by so we don’t stumble and fall on our face.

But then one day, we are pierced so egregiously, so agonizingly such that walking or moving in some forward motion seems impossible without tripping on the laces the world has seemed to hang across our path.

And finally, we understand. We understand that we have to go back to the beginning, back to when the older and the wiser were just that. We sheepishly offer our floundering feet to those who themselves have learned to run, not as sprinters, but as marathoners, as runners going the distance, who take no pride in speed, finesse, or accolades, but in the pure fact that they had both the grace and humility simply to finish.

© 2007 K.K. Pullen