Hear ye, hear ye! Everyone make
way! Make way for me, the Self-Proclaimed Queen of Klutzdom! Honestly, do. I
just might end up missing my own shoelaces and trip over yours. Worse, I may
just drag you along. I won’t get hurt much; my skull just might be made of
adamantium, the number of times it’s been struck. I’d be more worried for you.
‘Self-proclaimed’ may not be the
best word to use in the case. I’ve been a klutz for as long as I can remember
and have been called so, though in various different forms of the word. If I
was ever graceful, I’m sorry I missed it. Once upon a time, it used to bother
me, with the number of times I had my head in the clouds and walked into walls
or somehow managed to stumble over nothing on a flat floor and skid on my heel
down a hallway. True story, I do not lie. But nowadays, I’ve given up on ever
trying to be a swan and have embraced klutzdom in all of its klutzy glory.
Looney Tunes taught me something:
‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.’ In this case, I might as well live with it
and have fun while it’s around. Sometimes, when I’m in a good mood, I sing Gene
Kelly and Frank Sinatra and dance in the hallways. That way, if I stumble, I
can cover it up.
To anyone who is reading this,
don’t tell me that you don’t have similar moments. You’d be lying through your
teeth. Or rather, through your brain. That saying never really made sense to
me. Every person wants to look as cool as ice at all times and a lot of people
manage to, at least to the public eye. But somehow, just when you need that
grace the most, it seemingly fails you, like that awkward moment when you’re
trying to talk to the guy you’ve been crushing on for ages or when you’re
trying to give a big presentation that’ll cover half your semester scores. Note
to readers: these two were purely hypothetical, not true. Somehow, something
happens and even if it doesn’t, you worry to bits that something will and end
up sweating through your collar throughout the entire ordeal about it.
But really, in all honesty, what
does it mean to be graceful? It’s a many-layered term; Shrek would probably
call it an onion. It doesn’t only deal with managing to place both feet firmly
on the ground while walking, or managing to cover a certain distance without
bumping into anything, or heaven forbid, not tripping over nothing. I still
have no idea how that happened. It’s something that means so much more than
just being stable on your feet and being a picture of constant elegance.
I read this article in a friend’s
blog once. Actually, it wasn’t an article, it was a story. A good story. It won
a prize. Good stuff, mate.
Anyway, what it says it that grace
is so much more than just good footwork and a man being manly or a woman being
feminine. It springs from something that rests deeper than the shoes on your
feet, something that exists at your very core. People say ‘you are what you
eat’, or ‘you are what you wear’, but in reality, a person is not defined by
their appearance or their gait. They’re defined by their actions. It’s like how
you judge a book not by its cover, but by its contents. And those actions are
what defines a person as ‘graceful’ or not.
Sometimes, the simplest words are
the most profound, and the word ‘grace’ is one of them. It is defined not by
what people see at their first glance, but from what people see when they look
past what you show everyone else and stare straight into your soul. Such grace
can only be perceived by those who truly try to know the person in question, to
know the real person who exists behind the general pretentions made as a
natural defense to the world. To those people who know your grace, you are
fortunate to know them. To those who can’t see it or choose not to, they
probably just don’t deserve to know you so well.
As for being graceful on your
feet, there are those who are fortunate to have natural iron grips at their
soles and then there are those who somehow manage to muck it up without even
trying to. But at the end of it, if it’s an incurable feature, accept it as a
part of who you are and embrace the idea of klutzdom, because honestly, what
could you do about it anyways?
