falling out of flow
Does this ever happen to you? You’re cruising along in flow mode, everything feels easy and right, when all of a sudden, you hit the skids hard and come screeching to a stop?
Yeah, me too.
Last week I came crashing out of flow. I was riding my mountain bike along a single track next to the Santa Fe River. I love this trail and ride it often. It runs up the canyon below the zen center, past the tire swing where we used to take the girls to play when they were little.
There are two footbridges, one skinnier than the other. I always push my bike over both. There’s no point risking a fall. Last Wednesday, I was at the end of a longish ride, but I wanted to keep going, so I turned up the river trail and took a fork that avoids both bridges; this section is narrow and lumpy with rocks, and runs hard on the river’s edge, but it means not having to dismount.
That’s when a willow branch grabbed my handlebars and flung me into the river.
It’s shocking how fast you can fall when you’re riding so slowly. I saw the branch and saw my front tire stop short and tip over. I saw myself fall. I was registering it in slow-motion but it was happening in double-time. So weird. One minute I was on my saddle, and the next I was up to my shoulders in murky water, my bike on top of me.
I popped up in an instant and vainly looked around to see if anyone had seen me. Nope, I was alone. It’s like the Zen koan: If someone off their bike in the forest but no one sees, did it really happen? A sharp, stabbing pain in my hand, calf, and hip said yes, it did.
The knuckles on my left hand were bleeding, and through the gore, in the narrow slot between my pinky and ring fingers, I could see a long, deep slice of white. Bad, my brain registered. I took inventory of my aching right calf: no blood or bones sticking out. Not so bad, said brain. I surveyed the rest of my body—scratches and scrapes but intact. Get home! brain commanded.
Dazed, I pulled out my phone and called Steve. I said something along the lines of I’m OK, but I need you to take me to urgent care for stitches. You know the myths of people in clutch situations lifting cars off injured toddlers? Don’t ask me how, but I rode the two miles home. I decided that, if at any point, blood started spurting out of my veins in a horror-movie kind of way, I’d wrap my sopping shirt around my hand like a tourniquet. I was soaking wet and cold, and I thought I might throw up, but it felt good to have a plan. It got me home.
I’m no stranger to falling. I’ve fallen off bikes, out of rafts, into holes, onto trails, down ski slopes. It comes with the territory. A few years ago at the doctor’s office, I had to fill out a new patient health form, which went like this”
Please list all injuries or previous surgeries:
I started where I always started—with the big one, the worst one.
1. Broken leg June 2016 (river accident). Surgery to repair tibial plateau fracture.
And then most recent one:
2. Surgery to remove hardware from tibial plateau, November 2022
I sat there, twirling the pen in my hand, wondering—what constitutes an injury? There are so many ways of getting hurt in the world! Some more exciting and glamorous than others, some careless, others just dumb. Some are injuries to the body, others to the heart and mind. Some leave scars. Others are invisible but unforgettable. Once I got started, I couldn’t stop.
3. Broken ribs (5) from snowboarding into a tree. 1999?
4 Stress fracture in foot (running too much) 2005?
5. Gash in head, 1975, age 5, hit by a chairlift, 6 stitches
6 Gash in foot, 1980, wading barefoot in stream; 6 stitches.
recovery protocol: childhood, climbing Delaware water Gap in a tube sock (with stitches)
7. Broken tailbone from falling on a doorknob [2004?]
8. Gash in head from being attacked by man w/a rock [2009
9. Emotional fallout after being hit by rock [2009-10]
10. Falling into a hole while being charged by a bull [2019]
My list went on. It was grossly incomplete. It was going to continue for as long as I did, of this I had no doubt. Wreckage is ongoing, but you can't dwell on that. You have to make a plan, stay calm, and keep going as best you can. You have to focus on on what you have in this moment, what you can do now, not what might happen in some unknown future scenario. This is the hardest part, but you’e got to be ruthless about it.
Now I had a new addition to the List. At home, Steve examined my hand while I squeezed my eyes shut. I can’t stand the sight of blood or flesh, but he’s so calm he should have been a doctor. “Hmm, OK, wow,” he said, sounding almost impressed. At urgent care, he sat with me in the room while a nurse gave me four novocaine shots and sewed three long blue stitches between my fingers. “Don’t tell me how bad it is," I told the nurse, laying my head on my arm dramatically.
The nurse sent me home with a week’s worth of antibiotics and strict instructions to take it easy. I knew I was lucky; it could have been much worse. Still, my whole body hurt, and I felt so depleted and unmotivated from the antibiotics, I’d try to write two sentences and then flop onto the carpet.
The morning of the accident, practicing on my slackline, I wondered briefly if I was allowed to feel so happy, doing nothing of purpose, just playing. Then I’d gone and cast my ballot in the presidential election. What if the fall was some kind of karmic comeuppance or, worse, a bad omen? What if it was the end of flow?
Before I made the List, I might have believed this. It was easy to laugh off my own carelessness or ignore my injuries and shove them into a mental compartment reserved for random events and fluke occurrences that had no bearing on anything. But my logic was flawed. The List didn’t belong over there and life over here. I couldn’t separate the two, even if I wanted to. The disruptions that came from setbacks, pain, missteps, and hurt weren’t unrelated or antithetical to flow. They’d led me there.
“Sometimes you’re clicking and sometimes you’re sticking,” I tell Pippa and Maisy when they’re having difficulties, when things are not going their way, or life feels hard. Flow is not a fixed state, and—in almost every case—neither is injury.
A couple days ago, I got my stitches out. The laceration had closed up but not as cleanly as the nurse had hoped. “It will leave a scar,” she said apologetically. I smiled and shrugged. It’s OK. Our injuries create a narrative of their own, broken and lumpy in places, laced with scars, sometimes amusing but also occasionally terribly sad. They are their own body of work, reminders that ebb is part of flow, and flow is part of ebb, on and on, forever; and that falling is flowing—especially into a river.
xo katie
Practice:
Make your own list. Let your mind wander. The death of your first dog? Definitely an injury. Falling on the ice while chasing after your dog chasing a coyote? Yup. Breaking your arm on the swingset when you were six? Everything counts. Follow this and where you go.
You’re invited! DESERT FLOW CAMP!
Join us February 12-16 at the dreamy Willow House for 4 nights and five days of trail running, hiking, writing, rambling, yoga, meditation, dark skies, friendship, fab meals, and simple, pleasurable flow practices you can do anywhere, anytime! This is a co-ed retreat set in the wild expanse of west Texas, just outside of Big Bend, National Park. February days are typically clear and in the low to mid 60s, perfect for roaming the miles of trails just out the door. We’ll be delving deep into the lanscape of our imagination and cultivating creative habits that will inspire and transform us. Did I mention there is a POOL? This place is made for flow. Interested? Please fill out the form below to see if Flow Camp is the right fit for you. This retreat will cap at 18 guests, and accommodations range from private King casitas to shared Queens, all with their own bath. I’m so excited for this adventure, and I know you’ll love it, too!
