I am officially “needs-pain-meds-after-a-run” years old.

Advil, or what they call Nurofen here, is getting me through a current season that may just be how things are now. A year ago, the same injury went away after a couple of months. Now it persists, just like that all-over-ache when I rise from a long-held sitting position (especially if it’s been on the floor). Age is showing up in my body, in my photos, in the fact that I just forgot what was going to be the last example in that list of three.

And yet we’ve spent every day of the current break (three days in!) playing soccer with the boys. The first day I was so winded after a couple of minutes that I wanted to quit (and ice my hammy), confirming my belief that my cardiovascular endurance is limited to scheduled, routine activities. We played on, though, and I watched Little Brother dramatically dive for the ball, and fall purposely and more spectacularly the harder I laughed, and I knew in that moment that this upside-down, summer-centric Advent season we live now will forever hold that image that age can’t rob from memory: LB with his bicycle helmet on (because, yes, we’re also doing bike-riding lessons–three days in!) and his concentrated squint and his ever-present laughter.

Age and youth side-by-side, he and I, and within myself, sprints across the field coupled with lessons on balance gained from years of falling. It’s never just one thing–it’s all the things together that make up a life. Ups and downs, highs and lows, beginnings and middles.

It’s all the things together that make up Christmas. This mixture of sacred and mundane: muppets singing carols and angels glowing on trees, brotherly fights in the backseat while age-old familiar notes float from the speakers, the memory of A Christmas Carol with friends at the theatre paired with a rushed dinner afterward because everyone is so. damn. tired. Especially this year, when we apparently all conspired to just jump back into normal life and act like that was normal after the previous two years we had? Like, really?

I and my hammy need a break. Because the body, she keeps the effing score. As does the brain, specifically, according to research, and it’s hard to find a better, more ready-made metaphor than the one in the association between trauma and memory–how trauma reduces out story, leaving instead a jumble of sensations and images because of the way memory is stored during these moments. How typical memory is a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. How, once full memories are recovered after/through therapy and a person can tell their particular trauma story, it often stops ravaging their brain and body and helps them, finally, leave it behind.

Stories literally heal.

And in another book, one I read every Advent, there’s this interpretation: that grace shows up in the places where we don’t believe, to convince us, which explains, for me, why it keeps showing up in the same places, in the same lessons. Beginnings, over and over, like learning to balance again and again, until that moment when you finally get it. Until you fall again, because we all, always, fall again. And there grace is again, to pick us up, sore hammy and all, to make sure that the beginning and end aren’t the same moment, but are separated by all that’s in between, so much then and now and ahead that you might be forgiven for thinking that there may actually be some stories that go on forever.