“You will fall. It will hurt. And you’re going to be okay.”
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I found myself giving that advice yesterday, as I took my children roller skating for the first time.
I watched the fear and excitement on my son’s face as he tried to get his bearings, with his feet threatening to pull him in opposite directions. As I said this to him, it hit me how deeply I’ve learned this lesson, and that I wish someone had told me earlier. We are not here to get through life unscathed. In fact, if you’ve made it to adulthood without a few significant failures, you probably haven’t tried much at all.
As a child, I was a perfectionist. If I wasn’t sure I would get it right the first time, I was reluctant to try. I didn’t want to fall, didn’t want to be embarrassed, didn’t want to risk failure. It took a while, but I finally learned that it’s worth the fall—it’s worth ten falls, it’s worth falls that break me—just to risk doing something great.
It took breaking my leg in the mountains to say, “Hey, pain isn’t going to kill you. Stop trying to run away from it.”
We get so used to rushing away from any sensation other than “numb,” that we miss the peaks and valleys that make life so beautiful.
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I’ve been noticing lately just how many people would choose numbness, choose inaction over risking pain. We get so used to rushing away from any sensation other than “numb,” that we miss the peaks and valleys that make life so beautiful. We are so afraid that the fall might hurt, that we stay where we are instead of taking the leap. Maybe it’s me, and maybe it’s the falls I’ve already taken, but I’d rather have to let a few scrapes mend than live with the never ending wound of “what if?”
If you find yourself standing on unfamiliar ground or stepping to the edge, fueled with equal parts fear and excitement, just know that millions of others have gone before you through those same steps. The things we value the most are often the most hard earned, and in the end, trying to avoid the fall results in a much deeper pain: regret.
I love the way Louise Erdrich describes this:
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
If you are going to do anything of value in life:
You will fall.
It will hurt.
And you’re going to be okay.
Where you are headed is worth the fall. It’s worth the pain. It’s worth the tears. It’s worth the mess, because in the end you realize you had to get through that mess to get to something beautiful.
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This article originally appeared at Be You Media Group and is being reprinted with permission from the author.
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Photo: Pascal/Flickr