Kay:
Happy Friday, Mentorship Questers! Welcome to Episode 85. Today’s quote comes to you from Confucius!
Shi:
He says, “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
Kay:
It’s such a classic quote and example of that “just never give up” mentality.
Shi:
Right? This concept of get up, and keep going. It’s a simple message, but it really takes your whole life to learn it.
Kay:
Well be it, I think that you can learn it early…It’s just you take your whole life to play it out.
Shi:
That’s true! Maybe we fall a little less, or a little more gracefully, but the falling never stops.
Kay:
Well one of the things that we’ve learned in our time, (and this is actually from another mentor of ours – someone we had the privilege of hearing live several times…Ms. Bonnie St. John), and, she says, “It’s not about never falling. It’s just about getting up quicker.” And, she’s like…if you want to be a champion, just be the quicker getter-upper!
Shi:
Which is a fun way of saying this same, long-held principle that: it’s not about falling, it’s about getting up every time you fall. And, understanding this is one thing, but falling flat on your face, and being embarrassed, being hurt, and experiencing pain, and hardship, and whatever else happens along the fall – can feel really personal, and it can be really hard to feel like you even WANT to get up! I mean, we’ve all had those kinds of falls that aren’t just stumbles…They’re hard falls.
Kay:
Even the hard falls that have come across in life…a lot of us can look at those hard falls and be so afraid of facing the hard fall that we won’t even take the scraped knee! We won’t even take a bump on the shin. But what we didn’t realize was that the bump on the shin was the one thing that hit right before you made it to the top. And so, sometimes, it’s about understanding that frankly the giant flat fall on your face (embarrassing, crazy – those kind of falls) are maybe like an every other year thing – BUT living in fear of that will stop you from so much greatness in the meantime!
Shi:
That’s so beautifully well said and I think this concept is really wired in us. I think we know that falls are going to be part of life. Certainly watching my three kids (at ages nine, nine, and six)…They are some TOUGH COOKIES, man! They’ll ride their bikes, and Annadel (the six year old) just learned to ride without the training wheels on, and she’s actually doing really good!
Kay:
Shouldn’t we have received a text about that or something?
Shi:
Well we FaceTimed Gaga!
Kay & Shi:
(*Laughing*).
Shi:
But see: she’s had a few pretty good tumbles, but she’s still determined to ride the bike. She knows that falling is part of the path of riding the bike, and she’s got a pretty good sized bruise on her back and on her leg, but – you know what she says every single day?…”Can I go ride my bike? Can I go right now?!”…She’s so excited to learn the new skill and to get out there because she knows that if she falls – and when she falls – that she’ll continue to rise, and keep riding, and that will make her better able to avoid more falls in the future!
Kay:
Now, that’s really a black and white situation…But what about a long term goal? Like – “I want to be a healthy person.” You know, the fall on your face might look like falling off track on your exercise routine for multiple weeks, or it might look like even just breaking that diet for an evening, depending on what your standards are and where you are in your journey. And so, as we get older, it feels more ambiguous, and we think that maybe there isn’t room to fall anymore. And, we think that maybe the standards of doing and failing and succeeding are just so blurred that it doesn’t really matter. And it can get a little bit confusing. But, recently I was on a run and the marshmallow song came on (of all things), and the song is called Room to Fall. And, the lyrics go, “If you can look down, then you’ve got more room to fall. If you can look down, then you haven’t hit the bottom at all.” And so I looked at my feet and I thought to myself, “Well, really – the bottom of life is death…So if I am NOT in the ground, then I haven’t hit the bottom at all yet, Have I?!”
Shi:
That’s a great analogy! And I love that you were able to remember that quote and have that moment while you were running. And, I think you’re so right. I mean, when you’re a kid, you understand that physical falling is part of it. But that courage – you’ve got to cultivate that so you can translate it over to that more ambiguous time of your life called adulthood – where responsibility only grows in great measure as you get older – which (in turn) can make it even MORE petrifying to quote on quote “fall” in your life, or fail at something. And, I think sometimes we need this simple reminder that our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall, just like Confucius says!
Kay:
So, today’s quest is to examine some of those falls. What lesson from the fall can you take with you and bring with you for your rise? Remember, it is in the rise that the glory of the lesson lies. Happy questing!
Shi:
Happy weekend!
