Sideways

We had a sleepover, recently, my three-year-old granddaughter and me. On these fantastic every-once-in-a-whiles, we pile into the bed in my daughter’s old room, watch a few episodes of CoComelon and then tell stories over and over in the dark.  When morning comes, my little wonder always exclaims, “It’s wake-up time!” which signals our pilgrimage down the hall to start the day. We roll out from under the covers, land our feet on the hardwood floor and like a couple of wobbly new-born colts, begin to make our way.

“We’re walking funny, aren’t we?” I asked rhetorically, as Austyn in my yellow Lakers t-shirt teetered her way unsteadily half-a-step ahead of me.

“GG, this is crazy,” she said. “I’m like walking sideways,” her eyebrows high in the middle, her lips pursed together in a perplexed sort of bow. 

I chuckled while reaching to smooth her disheveled dirty-blonde hair that now extends below her shoulder blades. Sideways was not at all the track she had intended. And yet, that was the way her body on autopilot had decided it would go.

“Who among us hasn’t been there?” I thought, recognizing the tilt.

Spinning off without our own approval. Skidding haplessly in a direction that doesn’t seem to serve our purpose. Crossways, perpendicular to the path. 

Despite our best intentions, sometimes it’s just insanely hard to walk a line.

I’ve spent a good part of my life immersed in competitive sports. We rarely took the floor without a plan, and though I’d like to say we always followed it to a “T,” that would not be true. We knew what we wanted to do, how we wanted to do it. The road was always clear, at least inside our practice minds. And yet, there came a point (more often than I’d like to admit) when things would just spin off. The ball would be moving, the players performing the tasks they had been assigned, the score dutifully taking care of itself. Then suddenly, off the rails we’d go. And nobody really knew why. The ball would start to stick, cuts would morph from tight to loopy, the carefully choreographed dance would stutter on its way to breaking down. Then the score, in valiant predictability, would reflect the lateral lean. 

Sometimes we could course-correct, sometimes we couldn’t. Invariably though, when the contest was over, we’d look back at the skid and be able to almost pinpoint precisely where and when it happened. The riddle we had trouble solving, however, wasn’t where and when but how. 

You don’t see sideways coming. It just does.

Like lightning, on occasion. Leaving a burn mark on a relationship much the way it does on a game. A text message arrives void of tone, and off we go. A comment gets taken out of context and we bend. A slight lands --without a directed arrow but painfully in a soft spot just the same--and as quickly as a wet bar of soap squirts out of purposeful hands, whatever we were sure about is gone. We look around and don’t know what upright is. When we get sideways with those we care about, the pieces don’t seem to fit. And it can happen in the blink of an eye.

But mostly, things go askew less loudly. There is no emphatic explosion. No sirens sound and no one marks the spot.  Our steps just start to veer off-kilter. Sometimes the ground changes grade ever so slightly underfoot. Sometimes the climate shifts, the air swelling a little bit thicker overhead. Sometimes a pleasant breeze turns into a distracting wind. And sometimes for no palpable reason we can point our finger to at all, we lean.

We get to walking crooked.  

Typically unaware, until we look up and see how unfamiliar things look. Or we run into a wall. Cattywampus creeps upon us while we’re otherwise engaged.

On the rare occasion-- when all the stars align—lateral movement can help us float like a sidewinder snake above the hottest desert sand and over the dunes with ease. But generally, it’s a detour we could do without. In the best case, it throws a hitch in forward progress. In the worst, it can unravel all sorts of carefully stitched seams. Regardless, no one is immune. Austyn was right—sideways does feel crazy. And it happens all the time.

P.S. The Crooked Footpath