When Your Life Feels Stable

My home is my beautiful and safe space where my heart is.  The stairs of my home are like the portal to the different parts of my home with different meanings for life.  Every step down, one after the other, my feet are met with stair after stair until I reach the bottom.

 I always want to have a home that has at least two sets of stairs going up or down from the main level.  I love the feeling of my muscles engaging all day each time I take the stairs. Whether I’m being productive running to meet the needs of myself, my children, my business, or the many people who show up at my home.

I live in a two story home.  There is the main level, and from there you can go up to the second story or down to the basement.  I love the stairs. I especially love to run them, taking two or sometimes even three at a time, jumping as I go, activating my muscles.

I smile when I do this because I love my staircase.  With each step my foot meets the floor and I am held up.  I assure myself that the next step will be there.  My body trusts the movement I’ve repeated so many times.  

The muscle memory I have cultivated over years of bounding up and down stairs, assures me that I will be met with exactly what I expect each time I take a step.  I expect the ground to be there in the shape of the next stair, and it is.  

Today as I walked down the stairs from the second level to the main, I slowed down.  I felt the odd sensation of the things I know mixed in the things I feel, but can’t see. Still, everything around me looks perfect, just as it should be.  

Every time I walk down the stairs, I am stable till I reach the bottom. This is what I see and yet, it is not what I feel today.  Going downstairs, I don’t ever fall, I rarely trip and even if I trip, the stairs are there to catch my fall.  

I’ve learned to know and trust that the stairs are always there; but as I run down them for the 20th time today, repeating the same reassuring ritual each time, my body slows and I feel an eerie instability in my life.  The feeling lingers in a way that feels unreal with so much around me that is real.  

Yet, the feeling is so real, so tangible, I can almost see it or touch it which doesn’t follow what my eyes see.  Everything around me seems to tell the story of stability.  This scene says to me… everything is normal, your life is normal.

 My home is heated when it’s cold and cooled when it’s hot.  I have water when I turn on the faucet.  I have a fridge and a pantry stocked with food and a house full of children who eat it. When the food’s gone, it’s replenished with more, after I go to the store of course, not by magical shopping elves (though I’ve tried to find those).  

All these things, that make life seem normal so that it keeps going on, gives the sense of stability. When Life feels stable, it’s almost impossible to process the things that have created an instability that you cannot touch, but somehow it seems to be there. 

I feel so unstable, so I see myself creating as much stability as possible.  And why?  I need proof.  As the visual things in my life that are stable are all around me, it helps to not see or deal with the things that are unstable.  Not because I don’t want to, but because I have to. 

The unseen things like: my heart, grief, my ability to get out of bed, my success and failures, overwhelm, my new ability and inability, the family that once was and the family that I still have,(that is not at all what I had).  

It is different and new and something I now have to manage amid a hurt that was never there before when everything felt stable.  When the things I could touch and the things I couldn’t all felt stable together. Everything felt as if it would stay that way.

I didn’t have much reason to believe that life would get harder than I could fathom. Metaphorically speaking it’s as if the staircase of my life was ripped away from me right as I was just taking that first step downstairs.  

It’s as if, instead of the staircase being there as my foot landed on the first step, there was nothing and I fell.  And nothing caught me.  It was an experience that had never happened before.  I did not expect it to ever happen.  

In all my previous experiences of stepping down, I had nothing but the step being there.  So in that moment I stepped and fell, everything I knew as real, was immediately something different and I had no point of reference. 

So shocking it was that even today, so many years after that, I think that inherently. I don’t trust the stability of my staircase anymore.  Today as I walk downstairs, I know there are stairs there. I can still see them and I see so much stability around me, but I still find myself wondering will they still be there as I step?