“The harder you fall, the heavier your heart; the heavier your heart, the stronger you climb; the stronger you climb, the higher your pedestal.”
Criss Jami, Killosophy
There are certain lines you read that do not try to comfort you directly. They do not pat your shoulder or hand you a neat solution. They simply place a mirror in front of your life and let you recognise something quietly familiar. This is one among them.
When I first read it, I didn’t think of falling in the dramatic sense. I thought of the private kind, the small collapses that happen inside us, the ones no one sees. The mornings when you carry an unspoken heaviness and still go about the day. The weeks where something doesn’t go the way you hoped, and you adjust without announcing the disappointment. The subtle ways life presses on you, reshaping your inner edges. The heart becomes heavier in these moments. Not in a burdensome way, but in the way clay gets weightier with moisture, more grounded, more malleable, a little more real. A heavy heart is often just a heart that has felt deeply and stayed awake through the feeling. And from that kind of weight, a strange strength grows. Not the obvious kind. More like the strength that shows up when you are washing dishes after a difficult day and realise that resilience sometimes looks like simply continuing. Or the strength that comes when you choose gentleness instead of bitterness, even when the easier option is to shut down. It is the strength that quietly accumulates in the background, almost unnoticed. Climbing then is not always a dramatic ascent. Sometimes it is just learning how to inhabit yourself again. Standing back up in small ways. Saying yes to one more day. Understanding that healing rarely arrives with ceremony, it arrives slowly through ordinary movements. And that pedestal the quote speaks of… I don’t read it as a place for applause. I see it more like a vantage point. A higher place within yourself where you can see with a little more clarity, a little more compassion, for your own past, for other people’s hidden struggles, for the world’s unevenness. It is not a pedestal you climb to show others you have overcome something. It is one you reach almost quietly, without realising that the path upward was carved by all the moments that once felt like a fall. There is something tender about that, how life keeps shaping us through the very things we once wished to avoid. And maybe the insight is …: the heart does not grow heavier to weigh us down. Sometimes it grows heavier so we have something steady to push against as we rise. Life has a beautiful way of humbling us.