Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life

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Description

Now I find myself in late August, with the nights cool and the crickets thick in the fields. Already the first blighted leaves glow scarlet on the red maples. It’s a season of fullness and sweet longings made sweeter now by the truth that I will’t be sure I’ll see this time of the year again….
— from Learning to Fall

Philip Simmons was once just thirty-five years old in 1993 when he learned that he had ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and was once told he had less than five years to live. As a young husband and father, and in the beginning of a promising literary career, he all of sudden had to be told the art of dying. Nine years later, he has succeeded, against the odds, in learning the art of living.

Now, in this surprisingly joyous and spirit-renewing book, he chronicles his search for peace and his deepening relationship with the mystery of on a regular basis life.

Set amid the rugged New Hampshire mountains he once climbed, and filled with the bustle of circle of relatives life against the quiet progression of illness, Learning to Fall illuminates the journey we all will have to take — “the work of learning to live richly in the face of loss.”

From our first faltering steps, Simmons says, we may fall into disappointment or grief, fall into or out of love, fall from youth or health. And though we have little choice as to the timing or means of our descent, we may, as he affirms, “fall with grace, to grace.”

With humor, hard-earned wisdom and a keen eye for life’s lessons — whether drawn from great poetry or visits to the town dump — Simmons shares his discovery that even at times of great sorrow we may find profound freedom. And by sharing the wonder of his day-to-day life, he offers us the gift of connecting more deeply and joyously with our own.

From the Hardcover edition.

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