If I Could Fall

 I am a safety officer yet I am fascinated by people hurting themselves.  In my world everything is ordered and everything is safe but I have a small collection of old videos showing people falling over.  Recently I have been watching these videos and wondering the possibility of such spotenaity.  I have never since anyone fall or trip or slip in my life and these videos are the only examples I can find.  It’s incredible to me that anyone can be at the will of external forces, they are bound up by gravity.  I thought about what it would be like to experience a tumble and thought that perhaps I could make myself fall to the unsafe ground, but that would not be right.  It has to happen accidentally, without my consent, but how can it be allowed to happen? 

  These days I spend my time thinking of ways to accidentally pull me down but I’ve never thought of one that was entirely satisfiying.  We have to live in a society where no-one is ever hurt as the physical and psychological pain is unbearable for anyone to endure.  There are still explosions but large scale warfare is different to a cut or a graze.  Nobody gets hurt in a war.  In a war people stop feeling so there is no pain, but here we have become so very attune to every sensual texture and every change in tempreture.  We see more colours than we used to and we have more words to describe our world around us, but this has also may us more aware to the microscopic dangers that we did not notice and was not concerned of. 

  We have better poets than we used to but also more sucides and though the inpersonal war is constant we have to think of the small things that gives us pleasure.  Clip after clip people fall, over fences, over trampolines, at weddings, at birthdays, it seemed that no one in the old days wa immune to this danger.  Even older people used to celebrate this pain with films of people poking their fingers in other people’s eyes, hitting each other with mallets, hanging off a clock tower.  They thought differently then.  Pain was a more acceptable part of life.  An ancient dramatist once said ‘knowledge through suffering’ but that is quite an outragerous statement.  Suffering does not have to be necessary to aquire knowledge and I think it was overrated because people didn’t used to have any alternative but now with have the technology and a enlightened view of life that encourages happiness and pleasure.  Yes we do send people to fight other people but that is different, that is to secure our happiness and pleasure.  The people we fight are different, their idea of happiness is fighting in a war, so really the fight will be endless until either one side or the other is wiped out.  That is far away and I have my own concerns and responsibilities to deal with.

   I know it will never happen but I do wonder what would it be like if somebody took the rug from under my feet, would I learn anything?