It’s said, from old times, that “pride comes before a fall”: in my case, carelessness and haste precede a fall, and I mean that quite literally.
Hanging on a doorknob at home was a soft backpack handy for shopping, its straps trailing down in the shape of a noose. On Christmas Eve, as I was rushing out to Mass, I caught my foot neatly in its entanglement and was sent flying into a hard fall to the ground. There’s a split second when you know you are about to fall and you also know, within that second, that there’s nothing to save you. It must be like that tumbling out of an airplane or toppling over from a ledge.
