Mi sono proteso verso l’ignoto
e mentre mi avvicinavo alla sicurezza della vetta,
Sono caduto e mi sono ritrovato in un mondo lento.

I reached out into the unknown,
and as I neared the safety of the summit,
I fell and found myself in a slow world.

After Dante, Purgatorio IV, between lines 39-40.

I’ve had the opportunity for reflection in recent weeks, and I’ve come to recognise just how long I’ve been doing this sort of thing – pursuing a life of intentional adventure. I roped up for my first rock climb in 1986 – I completed my first 50-mile ‘run’ in 1989 – and like any trail and mountain runner and climber, I’ve taken many, many tumbles along the way – countless lead falls, falls bouldering, and ground-falls rock and ice climbing, falls on the high mountain trails, off bikes, on skis, and on ice, snow, mud and stone.

In nearly every case, a fall has been a chance – though not always welcome – to rest, reflect and re-assess what comes next.

Dante did not fall as he was reaching up to the ledge in Canto IV of his Purgatorio, so I’ve had to insert that tercet myself, holding hope that the passages following my invented lines – where Dante follows Virgil’s guidance and reaches a ledge – are on my own horizon:

“Figliuol mio,” disse, “infin quivi ti tira,”
additandomi un balzo poco in sùe
che da quel lato il poggio tutto gira.  

 Sì mi spronaron le parole sue,
ch’i’ mi sforzai carpando appresso lui,
tanto che ‘l cinghio sotto i piè mi fue.

‘My son,’ he said, ‘drag yourself up there,’
pointing to a ledge a little higher,
which from that place encircles all the hill.

His words so spurred me on
I forced myself to clamber up
until I stood upon the ledge.

Dante, Purgatorio IV: 46-51

I took a bit of a fall a week ago reaching for the top handhold of a climb about 4 metres above the floor of our local bouldering gym. It wasn’t particularly far, but it turns out that doesn’t really matter.  I’ll spare all the details here – suffice to say that when the trauma doctor said ‘I have some bad news and some good news’, I didn’t process much beyond ‘you’ve broken your back’ before my own body’s response was to shut out the world for a while.

The ‘good’ news, when I came to a few minutes later, was that it was an anterior wedge vertebra fracture, or compression fracture, which shouldn’t impact mobility or the spine. A relief of a kind, and recognising it could have been far worse, and I was exceptionally well cared for – nonetheless the worst injury I’ve ever had.

Where I live here in England, we are in late autumn, whereas in the US friends are enjoying the season of the sticks period of fall before the snow. This is often a time of rest and mulled wine, hearty soups, and a hygge-like comfort with introspection. Where autumn is itself a descent into cooler weather, our fall is from the leaf, as ee cummings tells us, and as Robert Frost reminds us with his Oven Bird, in autumn we are in ‘that other fall we name the fall’.

As we enter winter months, autumn falls behind us, though its past tense, fell, is reserved in these parts for mountains and upland moor (and fell running, of course) – from the Old Norse fell & fjall for the same. Perhaps it’s partly the language tying the Scottish, Welsh and English mountains to my beloved fjells and fjalls of Scandinavia that helps make them feel like home.

More likely, I just like going up.

This fall (and engage in decidedly Thoreauvian etymological contortions), where a single mile at a 22-minute pace is about all my body can muster for the day, a period of enforced rest has invited contemplation, not just on the act of falling, but on the significance of a fall.

Each fall – whether literary or literal, whether seasonal or topographic – is a reminder of both our limitations and inherent vulnerability. Yet, it’s in acknowledging this vulnerability, which I’ve sought so many times – in pushing beyond the familiar – that there is so much for me to learn.

As the cold seeps in through the centuries-old brickwork, drawing a subdued veil over the hues of autumn, there’s a subtext of surrender, of yielding to the natural order of things – if we’re lucky enough, under a smoothing cover of the coming snow. Maybe I have a newfound respect for the fall, then, both as a season and an experience, each a line of verse in the inevitable descent that precedes every ascent and allow us to sow the seeds of contemplation for the what lies ahead.