familiar stairway—
the body learns a new way
to meet the same sky
There is a quiet assumption we carry into our days—especially in summer—that things will unfold with a certain ease. Light will linger. Familiar paths will hold. Our bodies will move as they always have.
And then, without warning, something shifts.
This summer, at our beloved lakefront family cottage—a place etched with memory, rhythm, and return—I took a clumsy fall down a well-traveled stairway on a hill. A path I have walked countless times. A hill that held no hint of danger until it did.
In that moment, everything changed.
I dislocated and fractured my right shoulder. The ease of vacation dissolved into pain, stillness, and a sudden dependence I had not anticipated. The landscape remained the same—the water, the trees, the light—but my way of being within it was altered.
It is tempting, especially in spaces devoted to mindfulness and resilience, to search quickly for meaning. To wrap the unexpected in language of gratitude or growth. But the truth is, not every experience arrives with an invitation to joy.
Some arrive asking only for acceptance.
Acceptance is not a bright emotion. It does not rush in to reassure or resolve. Instead, it sits quietly beside what is difficult and says: this is what is here.
In the early days after my fall, acceptance felt far away. My mind returned again and again to that familiar hill—how something so known could become the source of such disruption. My body resisted even the smallest movements. There was frustration in what I could no longer do. There was grief in the sudden loss of ease I had not fully noticed until it was gone.
But healing—like so many things—began not with a dramatic shift, but with small moments of allowing.
Allowing help.
Allowing rest.
Allowing the day to be what it was, rather than what I had hoped it would be.
In these moments, I was reminded that acceptance is not about agreement. It is not about liking what has happened or finding a silver lining before it naturally appears. It is about meeting reality as it is, without adding the extra weight of resistance.
There is a quiet strength in that.
As the days unfolded, I began to notice subtle changes—not in the circumstance itself, but in how I was relating to it. The pace of life slowed in ways that invited attention. Small gains—a bit more movement, a little less pain—became meaningful markers along the way.
Not celebrations, exactly. But acknowledgments.
I found myself returning to the gentle rhythm of the children’s book Fortunately, Unfortunately—that steady cadence of life unfolding in contrasts:
Unfortunately, I fell down a familiar hill.
Fortunately, I was in a place I love.
Unfortunately, my shoulder was dislocated and fractured.
Fortunately, I have health insurance.
Unfortunately, my plans unraveled.
Fortunately, I was given an unexpected invitation to pause.
Life rarely moves in a straight line. It pulses between what we welcome and what we resist, what we choose and what chooses us. Holding both—without rushing to resolve the tension—feels like its own kind of practice.
What I am learning, again, is that resilience does not always look like rising up. Sometimes it looks like softening into what is here. Trusting that even when life takes an unexpected turn, we can find our way—not by forcing a different story, but by gently inhabiting the one we are in.
This was not the summer I had planned.
But it is the summer I am living.
And for now, that is enough.
