Why do we fall?

A few weeks ago, I was walking towards a parking lot and was startled to hear a tremendous scraping noise right behind me. I quickly turned around and saw the tail end of a teenage skateboarder's 90 degree stopping turn. Both because of the abrupt awkwardness of the turn and because he was no more than four feet behind me, I assumed he'd turned to avoid crashing into me. Glad that we'd escaped a collision and that he hadn't fallen over, I kept walking as he rolled past. But the interesting thing is that he kept making those 90 degree turns as he went through the parking lot and down a hill. Watching him make one awkward turn after another and nearly falling a few times, I of course realized that he hadn't been swerving to avoid me but was actually practicing a skill.

Skateboarding honestly makes me nervous, because I imagine you have to be okay with falling multiple times in order to perfect balance, turning, braking, etc. And, even as I watched this kid rolling around and skidding through awkward stops, it occurred to me that he'd probably fallen a lot before polishing the skill as much as he had. I couldn't help but admire his fearlessness.

I've been reflecting a lot lately about failure. It's not that I consider myself a huge failure at anything or that I'm wallowing in despair, but as a perfectionist, it's hard for me to accept small failures or shortcomings in myself. Interestingly, this failure avoidance has sometimes kept me from progressing--almost as if I'd rather stay in the safety zone of my known capacity rather than risk drifting out into the unknown where I might be exposed to things I can't yet accomplish. Failure and falling short aren't problems, but fear of failure is a crippling thing. If that kid had been afraid of falling, he probably would never have taken up skateboarding at all, and the only way we learn is if we allow ourselves to fall a little bit--to recognize the gap between what we want to do and what we can do. Because in that falling, as Bruce Wayne's father so memorably stated, we learn to pick ourselves up.