I fell down in the shower last week. I didn’t break any bones and I sustained no head injuries. But I did get a nasty welt down my back where I landed hard against the rail that the shower door slides into. And my pride was definitely bruised.

All in all, I was lucky. When I Googled “falls in the bathroom”, the search engine responded with this ominous headline: Bathrooms Can Be the Most Dangerous Place in the House. Then I asked: Okay, So Who Died in the Bathroom?

Well, for starters, we all know that’s where The King, Elvis, met his maker. So did actress Judy Garland and author Evelyn Waugh. And several royal personages over the centuries also had their demise on the toilet, including an ancient Chinese ruler Duke Jing of Jin who fell into the toilet pit and drowned.

What a way to go.

But I digress. None of those people died from falling – well except for Duke Jin – but that wasn’t in the shower. Slipping in the shower is the second most dangerous activity that causes injury in the bathroom. The first: BATHING. Bathing, I guess, is dangerous. (Especially for Duke Jing who took a bath in…well, never mind.)

But yeah. I guess it all comes of having to be Too Clean. Bathing can be dangerous and so can cleaning the shower because all that soapy stuff also makes things dang slippery. That’s what I was doing. I was cleaning the shower and shortly after I polished off all the goo that built up on the floor of our shower, I stepped inside to finish rinsing the doors and Whoops!

I just need to be more careful. I’m not getting any senior’s discounts just yet, but it’s never too early to start practicing Safe Stepping. With this resolution comes the evaluation of all my activities. What about walking – is that safe? That all depends on the terrain. If you move off the beaten path around here, you could very well break an ankle tripping into a gopher hole. And it depends on the season: winter lends its own hazards of snow and ice and frozen dog poop. That stuff could kill you.

So, does being safe also mean I shouldn’t go hiking or skating or skiing in the winter anymore? I’m not sure I care anymore about skiing anyways – the last time I tried, I cried all the way down the mountain, moving at the at the speed of a glacier as I tried to relive my old daredevil self of ten years prior. But at least I didn’t get hurt.

Which one is it going to be: Safe or Sorry? To some degree, always being safe and calculated is a little boring. And to be daring and spontaneous, the opposite of boring, could lead to deadly falls into toilet pits, so to speak.

There is a measure of sorry to being safe, isn’t there? I still want to be my old self and do all the things I used to. But my body can’t keep up in quite the same way. On days that I work-out hard or go for a big walk, I need to convince my knees that it’s okay to do the standing-up thing. Fifty-three is not old, but it’s not twenty-three, either. After I fell last week, it took me a good minute or two before I could figure out how to stand up again. For one, I didn’t want to fall again. And two, my body just didn’t want to move that fast. I lay there doing inventory on where I hurt and how serious it felt and then made a plan for how to get up.

So, The Plan is now to quit cleaning the shower. Or maybe just to quit showering. Neither of those options can be as bad as falling into a toilet pit, right?