Learning to fall
On Saturday, I fell from my longboard - tripping, somersaulting and landing face first in a ditch by the side of the road. Falling is something I’ve always been scared of - falling from the sky in a plane, falling from a boat into the water, falling from the top of a mountain while hiking. The fear of falling is always there, until you actually fall.
Sure, I got off lightly. Simon’s insistence on a helmet and wrist-guards meant I escaped with only a grazed, bloody knee and a little embarrassment knowing that three teenagers had seen everything. Yes it hurt, yes I was shaken. But I also learned that it’s ok to fall. I didn’t die, the world didn’t end and, actually, it meant I knew how to avoid falling on the next try. The fear I’d built up in my mind was so much worse than the reality.
We human beings stop ourselves from doing so much, because of fear. Fear of falling, of losing, of dying. We imagine the pain - physical, emotional or mental. We cringe at the embarrassment. We’re scared to be vulnerable or to trust that we’re so much more resilient than we give ourselves credit for. The more we try to protect ourselves, the more we lock ourselves inside a prison of our own making.
I’m scared to drown, so I’ll never learn to swim (said the old me, until I decided to learn to surf anyway). I’m scared to travel, so I’ll never go anywhere and feel trapped. I’m scared of being hurt, so I’ll never love and feel lonely instead. I’m scared to fail, so I’ll never even try. We have so many ways of holding ourselves down. And we tell ourselves it’s for our own good, until we find ourselves aching for more - to experience life, to laugh, to love, to feel held and supported and seen. We make ourselves sick with the effort of ‘self-protection’ not realising that we’re being both the prisoner and the jailer.
What are you afraid of? How is it holding you back?
The thing about fear, is that it can make you forget about all those times you’ve won it over. How many times have you come out of the other side of an experience, whether it’s falling over or going through a break-up, and realised, you made it?
Resilience is a bit like a vaccination. It can only start to work when it has a reference pain or infection point to come back to. To know that “I’ve dealt with this before, and I can deal with it again?.'“ In my classes, I teach my students that flexibility comes from the nervous system knowing it’s not in any danger and can relax, allowing your body to go deeper into the postures.
If I never want to fall again, I could give up long boarding and go do something else that’s less risky. I could, in effect, decide to live a little less and be safe a little more. But a fear of dying (or falling, or loving, or losing, or failing) means developing a fear of living.
It’s a paradox of life that sometimes, the cure is in the poison. Building resilience means being able to get back up, dust yourself off, and try again.
That can’t happen if we’re afraid to fall in the first place.
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