The Gift of Adversity

Not long ago Dwight and I made a big outing to Politics and Prose, our favorite bookstore, for a reading by Norman Rosenthal from his new book, The Gift of Adversity.  Seemed like a great topic for this period in my life, and I was feeling game for testing my ability to get around outside of the house with my steadily healing - but still broken - ankles.

The good thing about being a gimp in a bookstore is that other people in the bookstore tend to move slowly, which feels safer for the gimp.  The bad thing is that people in a bookstore are looking at books and are not watching for the gimp using the walker.  This does not feel safe.  I got backed into, bumped from all sides and caught an elbow in the ear when I sat down on the walker to steady myself.  Bad enough when any one of those things is just annoying, but when it has the potential to knock your wobbly self down on your already broken bones, it's downright alarming. 

That which does not kill us, says Nietzsche, makes us stronger.  I beg to disagree, Herr Nietzsche.  Sometimes what doesn't kill us just leaves us weak and bleeding.  I prefer to think of adversity in a different way, valuing grace over strength.  More like the way Leonard Cohen tells it:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything           
That's how the light gets in 

A gift, in this adversity, is in learning again about the value of the imperfect, about the value of what I can do even when there is so much I currently cannot do.  It's about finding light in the cracks.

Here is another way to talk about this kind of grace. This is the musing of Teresita in Luis Alberto Urrea's  Queen of America:
 
Huila had often told her that people sought God on mountaintops, but mountaintops  were too small for anybody to stand on.  If you really wanted to find God you would have to stand in the mud like everyone else.

 I am, I think, beginning to find the grace in this mud puddle.  It's a thick, squishy, oozy kind of grace that sinks in slowly.  That alright.  I've got lots of time.