Sometimes We Have to Fall Before We Stand

I’ve been watching my niece try to learn to walk... 

This morning my sister sent me a video of the first steps I’ve ever seen her take. She is scared, timid and afraid. And she has been trying to build up to this point her whole life. A little over a year of rolling, scooting and crawling has finally gotten her here. 

I keep thinking about this analogy in life; about how we come out of the starting gates wanting to run. But everything in us knows that life isn’t like that. We all experienced it for ourselves and yet somehow we seem to have forgotten one of life’s most basic skills.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll likely watch my niece take a few steps and fall down again. I’ll watch her hold onto things around her when she’s scared. I’ll watch her not even try at times and just go back to crawling because it’s what she knows and it’s safe. But at some point, I’ll watch her run, and never go back to just scooting herself around on the ground or crawling again.

No one looks at her when she falls down and thinks, “She’ll never get there; she’ll never walk.” We all just know that this is part of the process. So why is it that so often we've forgotten one of life's most basic lessons? Why is it that in our own lives when we fall down, oftentimes we just lay there and quit or just never get back up? 

I've been thinking about this a lot today and learning so much from my one-year-old niece. If you’re finding yourself falling down, again and again, don’t forget, you’ve been here before. Somewhere deep down inside of you though, you found the strength to get back up again and again. Look at you, you're not crawling around town. The same power that made your legs walk as a child is still inside of you. Sometimes we just have to remember how to find it again.