I admit it. I am one of those super-responsible Type A personalities, the kind whose first words as a baby were “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.” And I have been doing a pretty good job since then at taking care of things, right up until the moment I fell and broke my leg. In that moment, the world changed for me.
I couldn't get up. And I certainly couldn't continue running the world, or at least pretending to, in the same way. Suddenly I was dependant upon other people's abilities to take care of things, and it was a scary place to be.
"Okay, when do I get my illusion back?"I called a friend who broke her knee a few years back, and had traveled this shadowy road from injury to recovery. "Tell me, when do you get your confidence back, your feeling of being in control?" I asked.
"You were never in control in the first place," she assured me, "It was all an illusion."
"Okay, when do I get my illusion back?"
"You never really get it back again."
"What about the confidence to walk alone, to just take a walk for the pleasure of walking?"
"It takes about two years until you stop feeling so shaky," she replied, "I am just getting my confidence back now."
Two years until the return of my self-reliance, the constant companion that had accompanied me from my first steps beyond the crib. This was even scarier than the surgery required to repair my leg. How would I cope without that feeling of invincibility? I felt so vulnerable, so exposed.
In desperation, I opened my Tehillim, the Book of Psalms. Perhaps in place of my own competence, I could take shelter under the mantle of G‑d's protection. As I said Psalms, I searched for clues into my own predicament. Had King David ever suffered such a loss of self-confidence? If so, had he discovered a faster way to regain it than my friend had?
The Book of Psalms was filled with stories of King David's trials. And there, in the thirtieth chapter, he described just my situation, the sudden frightening loss of one's competence during a period of complacency. Yet, rather than regain his feeling of self-reliance, King David went further, ripping away the last vestiges of the illusion to reveal how his own strength had always been supported from beneath by G‑d himself. "You supported my greatness with [Your] Might." (30:8)
I had always been as dependant as I was nowHere it was. G‑d's protection was not a substitute for my own self-protection, a back-up to be relied on in times of emergency, but rather my own competence and strength had merely been a thin layer of varnish on the foundation of G‑d's support. I didn't need to regain my illusion. I needed to learn how to live without it permanently, in order to recognize the truth – that I had always been as dependant as I was now. I just hadn't known it.
I had surgery. The doctors broke and reset the bone in order that it should heal properly. And King David broke and reset my outlook, so that now when I walk, I recognize that we all walk with assistance from Above. "He set my feet upon the rock, firmly establishing my footsteps." (Psalms 40:3)
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