Here’s why falling is not failing – and how to learn from failure!
Note: This is a guest essay by S. C Lourie
There is something so beautiful about falling, once you let go and feel the wind serenade you in all your senses as you find your wings on the way down.
Autumn always has me pondering on the beauty of falling – something we are never taught about.
As a result, we wind up believing that falling is not okay.
It’s is a sign you are living. Moving. Giving life a damn good try.
What’s not to celebrate about that?
I wish we were taught about the beauty of falling when we are young, when we are okay with falling, when walking and falling are two of the same, when you couldn’t have one with the other.
I watch my littlest fall over umpteen times a day with such ease and stylish clumsiness and I am inspired. With all my heart I wish I had what she does.
The bravery, the ease, the faith in her little legs, in the energy of life moving through her, having her topple over sometimes and then having her get up straight.
As I trip up down the road sometimes I feel stiff and sweaty and anxious. Now of course physically, falling as we get older hurts more – and can have further debilitating implications.
I know my fear of physically falling also comes from my distance from the ground. Forgetting that the ground is my home, it is where I have come from, where my body will go when my soul moves on.
It also comes from my want not to fail in life – the pressure to get things right first time, to not embarrass myself, to minimize mistakes to extinction if possible.
When I look at this beautiful poster, I don’t see the name of this season.
I see the word “fall” as a call to actually – “to fall,” in a literal sense… to fall again and again – on my face – and to realize there’s nothing wrong with it at all.
And I think about the word fall as in “to feel as light as a flower in the wind.”
And…what if to fall is to be free, truly, in the deepest sense of the world?
Or…what if the universe is now calling me to fall so I need never fear it again?
I want to embrace the magic waiting for me in really allowing myself to fall, to fail, to get it wrong a hundred times over!
And I want no rules to live by anymore!
Instead I want to trust it all. And I want to say yes to my life, all the inevitable falling in it too. Don’t let them rob you of your falling. And don’t let the crazy fears of the world tell you 
something of nature, so celebrated in nature through the autumn leaf is wrong for you.
They are footprints in the sands of time declaring you are here, right now, right here and you’re giving it all your best.
With so many people absent from true living because they’re scared of getting it wrong, fearful of being rejected, your mistakes mean magic to the soil, I know it. Life produces more life, regardless of how many mistakes are made along the way. Fall, Sweet Soul, and kick being ashamed about it to the curb.
If you’re gonna do it at all, do it with style, do it with a heart-smile and if it needs to go on, do it for miles. One day we might just look back on our falling and see they weren’t failings at all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Check out my bestselling video course, The Anxiety Cure.
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