Why do we fall?

"And we do we fall, Master Bruce?"
No answer.
"So that we might better learn to pick ourselves up."
From Batman Begins

I cried today.

Nothing substantial, just a few brave pioneers leaving the comfort and safety of their homeland, expanding out over an ever-changing terrain of nose, cheek, hair, and chin, only to be wiped out of existence with the brush of a hand, or to dry up in alien territory.

The Patriots lost. For them, it may have only been a game, but for me it meant something more. I am aware that it is only a football game of minor significance, but for me, the near-perfect Patriots were the crux of a season-long metaphor.

In some consequential way, I felt that I needed the Patriots to win. I have been following the Patriots most of the season and have based Sunday afternoons and nights around their games. I wanted to believe that perfection was possible, that extraordinary achievement is within the grasp of ordinary men. Tonight, the broken pieces of a dream scatter my thoughts and feelings. Their failure just accentuates my failures and unrealized potentials all the more.

I wrote many months ago of A Raisin in the Sun, about Langston Hughes's Dream Deferred. I've never had many hopes and dreams for my own life; I haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up. I'm 28 years old. I feel like a tiring pugilist with too few tallies on my scorecard and too few rounds left to change anything.

I started working again recently. I make air clutches for an agricultural company in Ames; my job title is product assembler. I robotically grab appropriate pieces from storage boxes as fast as I can and put them together to fabricate, also as fast as I can, a small range of slightly different products. An image that runs through my head during work is of the giant machine-operated assembly lines of automobile plants. I pretend I am one of those machines, dulling my senses to baseline levels of being to steel myself against the relentless onslaught of a pedestrian existence.

Lana asked me what work was like. I told her that I died a little inside each day. I hope she doesn't believe me, I am only joking about a subpar situation, but make no mistake, I don't exactly well up with pride when I think of my job. I would almost rather tell friends and family that I am unemployed and have them think of me as a deadbeat than answer their questions about my work.

It does get to me though. Last week, on one particular day of which I can't properly remember the date of, I was fighting tears all day. I am not even sure why. I got up in the morning and simply felt hopeless. I struggled to not break down in front of Lana, struggled to keep it together on the way to work, and struggled to keep my composure during the eight hours of the day. I was reminded of an incident from my childhood that I just couldn't shake.

It was either fourth or fifth grade and a game of football was being played during recess. I was not an athlete, but a skinny, awkward, and unconfident player on any sports field. In fact, it was probably difficult to judge whether I was an on-field spectator or team contributer. One day I start getting some passes thrown my way...and I caught them! I was riding high off of an as-of-yet unknown wave of confidence and schoolyard glory. The player guarding me became embarrassed. After one fateful reception, instead of two-hand touching me, he rushes at me, sidesteps me, and somehow elbows me full-force in the side of the neck. I fall to the ground in a daze, get the wind knocked out of me, and recover to a state of excruciating pain in the muscles of my neck. I realize I have been crying unbeknownst to myself, then look up to see the perpetrator, crying himself. I always wondered why he was crying. I was in no state to fight back even if I had wanted to, which I didn't particularly wish for.

I spent the rest of the school day staring at the minutest details of my desk, focusing on trivial aspects of my surroundings to drown out the throbbing pain in my neck and head. When I lost focus, the blinding pain would return until I could trick myself into finding that tiny spot of infinite oblivion that was available on my desk. I didn't cry, though the makeshift dam in my mind was strained beyond any preconceived worst-case scenarios. Walking home increased the blood-flow to the injured area, and I could feel each and every systolic pulse as if there were a bass drum in my neck. I said hello to mom and walked straight upstairs to my bedroom where my dog, Ceaser was lying on a bean-bag chair. I shut the door and the levee broke. Hugging my dog, I sobbed until there was nothing left but the mucusy choking sounds one makes when they have exhausted the capacity to cry.

That is the way I felt at work on that particular day, like I would hold the tide of emotions in all day until I could just get home, hug one of my cats, for Lana would have been gone, and just cry until it was physically impossible to continue. But I didn't. I'm sure during the day my eyes grew red and glistened from an imminent outburst, but by the time I got home, I didn't feel so bad anymore. I suppose I'm not a kid anymore, maybe I'm no longer capable of such a range of emotions. Maybe adults just aren't supposed to wear their hearts on their sleeves, certainly men aren't encouraged to make their emotions so salient and observable. Yet, maybe kids are onto something. When do kids show their truest emotions? All the time! I know when my nephew is happy to see me, when he is thrilled to get a present, when he isn't happy about something, when he doesn't want to go to bed, when he is scared, and when he is sad. When do adults show the most emotion? When somebody is born or somebody dies.

So, I cried on the way home today. I doubt Lana even knew, it was dark and we weren't talking anyway. I wasn't crying because the Patriots lost, but because in their failure, my own felt significantly amplified. I certainly know that my lot in life is in no way attached to the success of a football team, but for one magical season, I seemed to staple my hope to the continued pursuit of perfection unparralled by any team of my generation. I still maintain hope for the future, as I've already coped with and begun to dissociate from a football game barely two hours over.

I believe a mainstream shoe company or sports drink company or something of the like would have us believe that "impossible is nothing". Well, impossible is something, indeed. But it is the challenge of besting "impossible" that makes life worth living; it is the ever-present foe, the unseen, worthy adversary that must be battled everyday. Loss is inevitable, but it is the fortitude needed to rise again to meet "impossible" that separates the eternal fighters from the footnotes.

Why do we fall?

So that we might better learn to pick ourselves up.