Kathrin Gabriel-Jones
May 24, 20191 min
People are messy. We humans are weird, complicated, nuanced, annoying, beautiful, these creatures capable of wonderful and terrible things. And yet, even in the midst of that confusing potential for goodness and awfulness which all seems to lurk just beneath the surface, there are bright spots of hope that occur in the world, surprising us like the unexpected twinkling of a bright star up in the night sky that we'd never realized we'd been looking for.
Laurie Anderson, in her song Walking and Falling, says that when you're walking you don't always realize that you're always falling forward with each step and catching yourself from falling. Imagine that as we're each moving forward, belief is the only thing stopping us from hitting the ground. We believe the ground will be there so much, we take it for granted until...
The world turns upside down and we aren't able to catch ourselves before we hit the ground.
Whether it happens literally with a fall or metaphorically in our relationships, a setback in career, or some significant change that turns our world upside down, we need a moment to re-calibrate, reconnoiter, and re-adjust to the way our perspective changed now that
Eventually, we get up again. Literally. Metaphorically. Belief is that thing that inspires us to get up again no matter how ruffled or flustered we might be, and start out on our journey once more, to lift our foot and take another step forward in the belief that the ground will be there when we set that foot down.