An inch of brick sticking up in my path is what did me in. Walking blithely along, minutes after a refreshing swim, I failed to see the danger. The next thing I knew, I was lying stunned after falling on my face. Blood was flowing from my forehead and I felt confused. Later, at a health clinic, it would take seven stitches to close the wound.

Plunging downward from a height of six feet is bound to be damaging. It’s also discombobulating and humiliating. You lose your composure, suddenly finding yourself in what feels like a different world. The assurances by which you live have been disrupted and you are left in a gaping no man’s land or twilight zone.

After the confusion cleared, my first interior gesture was to accuse myself of stupidity. The fall could easily have been avoided. Why did I not look where I was treading? How could I have been so distracted as not to be wary of a familiar hazard?

Since the event, I have replayed it in my mind over and over. Where exactly was the tipping point, I seek to discover?

But, as John Updike, in his most recent novel Villages, makes one of his characters reflect, “Accidents are accidents and demonstrate only the vacant absurdity of everything that is.” This is not quite my philosophy but it gives emotional expression to the feelings of chaos that falls provoke.

This kind of calamity happens to the celebritous as well as the rest of us. Complications from falls were a factor in the death of Katherine Graham, the legendary publisher of the Washington Post, and in that of longtime network news anchor David Brinkley.

When Harold Pinter was announced the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature, he was shown in the world’s media with a cane in his hand and a bandage on his forehead, emblems of a fall he had suffered recently.

The day before I wrote these words a neighbor emailed me with news that a mutual friend had fallen getting into a taxi and had broken his leg. And two other friends have done such damage to themselves by falling as to bring on seemingly endless complications.

We elders have no monopoly on falls. Falling is something that happens to people of all ages. I think of the graduate student friend who fell down the stairs of her divinity school. And in winter we see casts, braces, and splints on all sorts of people who have slipped on the ice. Everyone faces the possibility of this experience.

But older people fall more often and, when we do, the results can be much worse. In my city and elsewhere, our pathways are full of hazards, some of them the result of negligence. Cities and towns, individual homeowners, and landlords should be ashamed of the faulty brick sidewalks and other obstacles that endanger the passage of people with disabilities and others who must walk carefully.

Of older Americans, one out of three of us is reported to fall at least once each year. (Some studies suggest that the number is even greater ─ more than half.) And in the year 2002 such falls resulted in death for more than 12,000 of us. Had I landed on a stone railing nearby, my latest plunge to the pavement could have unceremoniously ushered me into that group.

For those with osteoporosis, the risk of breaking bones is acute. Unfortunately, bone breaks often lead to other reverses in bodily well being and, often, complications both long-lasting and grievous.

With stakes this high, all of those in later life have compelling reasons to take care. My latest misadventure has led me to make changes in my gait. Instead of walking with a sliding motion, moving my feet along rapidly, I now take pains to lift them. And when I must move fast, I scrutinize the terrain on my route. The Psalmist says: “Walk humbly before the Lord.” I now do.

The director of the Yale Program on Aging points to the loss of confidence some older people suffer as one highly undesirable result of falling. She says it often makes us cut back on physical activity and hesitate to leave our homes at all, a truly unfortunate outcome.

Almost every house presents hazards, especially on stairs and in bathrooms. Ideally, we should make physical changes to reduce the dangers but, according to one survey, more than a third of older adults say they cannot afford them.

Medications also increase the risk of falling. The side effects of many drugs include dizziness and vision problems. Part of a fall-prevention plan would involve adjusting medications to make sure they do not heighten the risk.

More information on preventing falls is available from the National Council on the Aging, reachable at 202 479-1200. If you have access to the Internet, the address is www.ncoa.org.

Richard Griffin