We had a monthly Reflection on the Rule of the Zen Peacemaker Order last week, during which we examine our behavior and actions in light of the Rule which we had vowed to maintain, and someone wondered: “How do I not stumble in my humanity?”

Not crash or collapse or surrender, just stumble.

Looking at the news, you might think that people are more black and white than that. Political leaders call each other liars, cheaters, thieves, scam artists, even evil. From their point of view, their rivals don’t stumble in their humanity, they lose it completely. Or else, they haven’t been human since the age of, say, seven.

I don’t think we lose it all, we stumble. And the same is true in the other direction. We don’t suddenly transform into giants, saints, or Mahatma Gandhis. When I walk the dogs in the woods, I sometimes find myself stumbling. Maybe it’s my eyes or decreasing balance; it’s also the uneven terrain, ups and downs of hills, the pebbles and twigs that dot the paths especially since the big storms of last week. So far, I haven’t fallen. I manage to right myself, straighten out my leg, and remember to pay attention to where I’m walking.

I’ve often been leery of the word transformation and don’t like to use it. Same when describing interesting people. They’re not great, they’re rarely special; they’re interesting. What they really are is human.

The great thing is to see the pit in front of your feet and step back before you fall in. Pause rather than react right away, take a breath. Change the words I use before uttering them, the voice, too.

The voice tells us so much. I notice that when I stumble and lose my poise with someone, the voice rises, the breath speeds up, and I seem to talk from the top of my head, almost from my scalp. When I get back on my feet, the voice’s timbre deepens, the pitch is lower, and the words seem to come from a place lower down in my body.

Doing those small things again and again is what makes the difference. Transformation has always felt too ambitious for me; I look for an opening, an insight, a sense of expansion and lightness. I look at how not to stumble in my steps.

The writer George Saunders discussed a short story by Tolstoy called Master and Man, in which the master, a wealthy and arrogant landowner, insists on driving out in his carriage with a peasant driver in the face of dire warnings about a blizzard coming their way. Sure enough, they get caught by the storm, can’t see anything, and the horses flee. The peasant, who didn’t want to go and wears only threadbare clothes, lies shivering on the ground, freezing to death, while the landowner is wrapped in a warm fur coat.

But as the bitter night progresses, with frigid temperatures and howling winds, thoughts, memories, and regrets arise in the landowner, and at some point he takes off his fur coat and drapes it over the driver. When help comes in the clear morning, they find the landowner frozen to death and the peasant hurt, but alive.

When I read the story many years ago, I almost cried. Now, that’s transformation, I thought to myself back then. But Saunders, who has taught and dissected Russian literature in Syracuse for many years, said that’s not the case. It’s not a matter of someone dying to self and transfiguring into a saint, it’s a redirecting of certain energies that have always been there, only now, rather than focusing them just on himself, he’s redirected them elsewhere onto a wider panorama, which includes his driver.

The master didn’t become a whole other human being; the terrible night brought a reshuffling of forces and characteristics that were always there, only now they’re acting in a less cramped and constricted landscape, and the resulting action is simple and organic, nothing miraculous or transformed. In fact, I think that Tolstoy is not sure that, had the survived the nigh, the would be a changed man. But that’s what he does that long night in the frozen steppes of Russia.

I stumble, limp along, find my balance, and emerge free, clear and strong from the woods in the morning. But there’s the next morning, and the one after that, and the one after that.