Hubris: Pride comes just before the fall, the broken bone and the broken ego

When I was a senior in college I broke my ankle, while walking home, stone-cold sober, from a science fair where my roommate won $500, so engrossed were we in tales of her nerdy brilliance and shrieks of joy that I did not pay any attention to the pile of tiny, trecherous rocks in my path.  The street where I broke my leg is just below greek row in the sleepy college town of Pullman, WA and everyone assumed that I had been having a grand old time, drunk and silly and clumsy when I had my little accident.  I did not often seek to correct this assumption because that year I got to thinking I was pretty hot stuff.  I looked good, I felt good,  I was studying something I loved, had many wonderful close friends and these friends and I were practically fighting off interested men (it is a fairly liberal use of the word man apply it to college seniors, but I am going to do it anyway) with sticks.  I think that it is this feeling of power, of control, of beauty and of confidence, a growing supercilious and arrogant nature that caused me to break my leg.  Something inside me knew that I needed to be humbled.  And like Achilles and Caesar, there was pride and then there was a fall.  

It seems I have not learned my lesson.  But where is the rule written that you must apply a lesson once you have learned it.  I have found in life that people are excellent at forgetting, especially the unpleasant things.  And again I fell prey to my own hubris earlier this year.  As anyone who has read my blog knows, I have lived overseas and travelled more than most.  And in this time abroad, I have never had anything stolen except for two bars of Ghiradelli chocolate (a loss to be sure, but not a fatal one) and I have never lost anything of major value ( a sweat shirt, a knife, a hat).  And in a long, rambling conversation about travel and life on the other continents with my friend Ruth, I went on an on about how it was important to be smart when you are a woman traveling abroad alone.  I admitted that there was of course an element of being lucky to staying safe and keeping all of my possessions while on the road, but mostly it was my finely honed senses and strategies which clearly so many have not mastered.  In the next week after this conversation I lost a beautiful and expensive shall from my mother, locked myself out of my apartment twice, lost my access card at my office and had my ipod pick pocketed in the metro.  Though there was no physical fall this time around, I felt truly defeated and all the bravado I had felt, the audaciousness, the self-posession and poise were gone.   I had not, as I had thought, conquered the world.  I couldn't even conquer America and I hadn't figured out things that others could not master, I had been lucky.  

The opposite of hubirs is most certainly humility.  I have gotten a healthy does of that this week as well.  I bought a new dress this week, a black, v-neck, spaghetti strap dress, that fits perfectly and hits just below the knee, the perfect, dress up, dress down, a perfectly timed one-two punch of class and sex appeal.  I look good in this dress.  I have also had a very successful work week and had lots of fun with my friends and been loving the city.  I was almost beginning to feel like the city itself loved me back.  This time again the fall is not literal, but dating (one of the ultimate exercises in optimism) has provided many tiny checks on my ego.  I hope that I am beyond the physical falling onto, into or over things, though I doubt it.  The constant rising and falling of hopes in one thing, but when you add the dress, and the ferocious feeling of fabulousness that accompanies it, it is far to fall when someone is not interested.  But I will do what I have always done, hobble back up to the top of the hill, where I can see everything and hope that maybe I have gotten one or two things right, that maybe I am brazen and maybe someone will like that about me.