the fuzzy-slippered foot of the universe
You can’t run fast enough to avoid it connecting with your ass. Trust me.
When you are meant to be doing something — even if it seems unlikely — there is no power that will keep you from it. You will find yourself again and again redirected. Sometimes in not-so-gentle, not-so-discrete ways. Sometimes, with a metaphorical foot in your ass, shoving you towards a cliff where a leap of faith is the only passage. Fall or fly, you’re headed in the one direction you’re meant to be. This metaphor for fate is one that emerged from a memory of a very cheeky version of little me.
When I was 7 years old, I blatantly ignored my mother one Friday afternoon. She was prepping for a “date night” with my dad — hair in “soup can” rollers, green clay mask on her face, fingernails freshly painted. She was wearing a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers when my best friend showed up at the door excited to drag me along to a spectacle through the cornfields across the street from our neighborhood. A barn was on fire and the whole neighborhood was going to watch it burn. My mother emphatically denied my pleas and whines to join the fray. And for whatever reason I to this day cannot fathom was worth the risk of her ire, I left the second she was distracted.
I have a vivid recollection of the smell of the cornfield, mingled with woodsmoke, the heat of the burning structure even from a safe distance, the prickling of the dried grass on my bare legs as I sat cross-legged in my gym shorts on the ground at the edge of the farm with adults and children alike from our townhouse community. I also have a visceral sensation of dread in recalling the sound of my name being shrieked through the cornfield, and the effect it had in pulling all attention away from a barn on fire, and re-directing it to me.
If it wasn’t bad enough that I was in trouble in front of the entire neighborhood, what came through that cornfield was an exhibition onto itself. Imagine the wicked witch of the west from the original Wizard of Oz, only she is wearing a bathrobe, and instead of pointy hat, giant rollers in her hair. In place of a broom, she levitates through the cornfield on fuzzy bedroom slippers, pointing a red-tipped finger straight at you. My lizard brain kicked in and I started running. I wove through the line of neighbors, and towards home (but not towards her). It was either ignorance or hubris to think that my tiny legs could outrun her. Maybe I was counting on her behaving with care in front of the community? Maybe I thought she would simply wait until we were behind closed doors to give me her full fierce freak out. So it came with repeated jolt of surprise each time her foot made contact with my butt. I simply could not outrun the literal ass-kicking. She kicked my ass all the way home. All the way.
To this day, whenever fate shoves at me — each synchronicity, each unavoidable “shit or get off the pot” decision, each time I realize I am about to leap and hope that I either grow wings or that a net will appear, I think about that day…when what I thought I wanted, and what I was supposed to do collided in a display of a mortifying loss of autonomy that was hotter than a barn on fire. As painful as these unavoidable kicks in the pants seem, the jolt is buffered. Like my mother, the universe wears soft fuzzy slippers as it gives that boot and gets you to scoot.