The Reason We Fall

My sister says that in our family we did not learn to fail.

I had not considered learning to fail as an important life skill, but I suppose it is. I have mentioned before that I am a paralyzed perfectionist. I am frequently unwilling to start something if the completed project won’t be perfect. And how many completed projects are perfect?

I have learned to find pleasure in some activities that resist perfectionism. I don’t do much yoga anymore, but I used to. I found spiritual value not in the meditations, which I usually greeted with quiet non-participation, but in the stretches. A person can spend her whole life practicing a yoga pose and still find there is more to it that she has not mastered. Improvement without perfection – it was good for me.

I cross-stitch. It is slow, steady work, full of the peaceful tedium of counting, the exasperation of unstitching mistakes, and the decision of which mistakes you can make work so you don’t have to unstitch the whole thing to start over. Accepting flaws – also good for me.

Now that I am a parent, I am thinking about how to teach my children to deal with failure.

My sister’s kids are a little older, and she tells them, “Everybody fails, and our failures glorify God.” My girls are too young to understand the concept of glory (come to think of it, maybe I am too young to understand it too). They don’t even really understand failure.

But they fall down a lot. And lately, every time they fall, I remind them to brush it off and then, if they still need my comfort, I put my arms around them and nuzzle their heads and ask, softly, “Why do we fall?”

Sometimes they answer and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they give me delightfully childish answers, like “So we can watch Peep,” their new favorite cartoon. Regardless of their answer, I remind myself to tell them again, with hope and tenderness:

“We fall so we can get back up.”