I'll come crawling to tie your shoe.

“Why do we fall master Wayne? So we Can learn to pick ourselves up.”

- Alfred

Resilience is the name of the game, no matter how many times we give up, we find that we have the chance to start again. This usually starts out looking like a lot of highs and lows which we experience very dramatically. Take a young teen, they can be riding the high of a newly found truelove one day and then be found wallowing in the depths of heartbreak and betrayal the very next day. It is a drama of extremes when your future wife changes her life plans between lunch break and second recess, and it hits hard!

We find it comical to observe or witness things like this in the young folk, but I think we are often unaware how these same drama plays out in our lives only in different areas. Sure, we become more mature and self-aware, and our relationships become more stable (hopefully), but the reality is we often leave areas of our lives in the same volatile state as middle school romance, shaken to the core by any turn of events, and unable to cope with the emotions that rise up.

In a lot of the important things in life we are simply pushed to adapt, grow, progress, and develop resilience as a matter of course. Take learning to walk, how many kids just throw in the towel on learning to walk? “That’s it, I’m done, I just keep falling, I guess I’ll just crawl the rest of my life”. This just doesn’t happen, up and down and flat on their face the resilience of babies as they learn to walk is an incredible example of the practice and development of resilience for the purpose of growth and progress.

I sometimes wonder how many of us would actually stick with it long enough if we had to learn to walk when were say, twenty or thirty? I think a lot of us might just settle for crawling. The funny thing is we are a lot smarter when we are twenty or thirty so you would think we would get that hang of things faster, but that’s not how it works. You see it takes a certain amount of naivety to learn to walk, you can’t over think it, you literally have to keep falling to learn how to do it, you literally fall your way into learning to walk. If you have an aversion to falling, or worse, go out of your way to protect yourself from falling, then you’re going to be that thirty-year-old who is crawling around and telling people all the perfectly good reasons why you never learned to walk.

This might sound funny or ridiculous in the context of learning to walk, but it becomes a little but more sobering when we transfer it into other areas of life, that are a little less obvious but no less significant. Many of us are still crawling around in many different ways, too smart to start falling our way forward. To make matters worse our world actually commends this, and rewards it. We don’t like to see people falling or stumbling around after they have reached their adult years, and to be fair it is not a pretty thing, just like the kid who stumbles and falls flat on his face after tottering around for a few seconds, so does the “grown up” lose control and fall down to the ground after a new effort to grow and move forward. The scary thing is that the falls are visible, but the crawling is for the most part invisible, but this doesn’t mean it doesn’t cause problems. Imagine if you had to crawl everywhere? How would that effect your life? How would that limit your options?

The reality is that a lot of us are still crawling around internally. We feel the pain, the limitation, and the fear of getting past it, but we are to safe and conservative to risk the falls. After all, why put yourself through the humility and the messiness when you can already tick enough of the boxes to pass the test of society? You pay your bills, you own a house, you have a relationship, a dog, a job, some solid drinking buddies, and even a hobby you enjoy, “if this is crawling then I’ll take it” you might think, “everyone else is doing it, so why should I change anything?” That’s a fair question. Is it better to stay where you are? Maybe, but first, let me tell you a short story.

One day you are crawling your way home from work and you decide to cut through the park. Why not? It’s a beautiful day and who would turn down a nice crawl in the park when the sun is shining and you just got let off work two hours early that Friday. So off you go. As you make your way through the park you hear shouts and laughter and a little ways off you see a group of people milling about in what appears to be a random and disordered fashion. Your curiosity gets the better of you and you decide to crawl on over for a closer look. As you approach the group you begin to realize something, these people are moving around quite fast, and what’s more they are moving on only their legs! Impossible! They are standing upright on only their feet and are dodging around kicking and chasing a ball. “What is this craziness? How do they manage it? Are they not worried about falling?” At this point your thoughts are interrupted by a yell and you look over to see two of the people jump and collide in midair before falling to the ground. “Ah that’s done it you think, that’s what you get for running around on two legs, I could have told you that”, but to your amazement the two players hop back up as quickly as they went down, and they appear to be laughing! “ Madness!” At this point one of the players notices you watching and jogs over to you. He approaches you and looks down with a smile, “Want to play some soccer?” he asks. you shudder, before responding, rather confidently “I don’t walk”. He nods in understanding and then responds, “That’s ok I used to not be able to walk either, but the cool thing is anyone can learn it!” I glance back over to field where the game continues, the players seem to be almost be flying, dodging here and there and calling to each other. You have to admit it looks amazing. I look back up at him and respond, “but what about the falls? Don’t they hurt? What if you can’t get back up? Isn’t it safer to just stay down?”

“Oh for sure he responds, it does hurt sometimes but that’s part of the game, without the falls we wouldn’t have been able to ever play, and yes it is hard to get back up at first but then it gets easier every time”. You feel the anxiety rise in your stomach as the thought of trying to rise sinks in. “Why risk it? Especially knowing you will fall?” Your thoughts are interrupted as an open hand reaches down towards you, and you look up, “Come on I’ll help you he says, just take my hand.” The past thirty-five years of crawling flashes before your eyes, your family, your friends, your work, what would they say?? And what would they do when I fell right in front of them? You look back at the open hand outstretched towards you, you start to raise your hand towards it, he smiles and then, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, “what the!?” Everything goes grey and the hand is now waiving in front of your face, you open an eye and there is your wife, “aren’t you coming she says?” as she flicks off the alarm clock, “to where?” you mumble a little disoriented “It’s Saturday she laughs, and we are crawling over to the parade this morning don’t you remember? The kids are all ready!” “Oh right…” You respond slowly, She laughs, “Go on crawl over to the shower and then I’ll have a coffee ready for you in the kitchen”. She crawls out of the room. You shake your head and throw of your blankets and then you pause, you look down at your feet and then over towards the bathroom, you think for a second, and the shake your head and laugh, “craziness…” you roll off your mattress and crawl over to the shower. The parade was supposed to be good this year, they were supposed to be a record number of crawlers participating, you pause again before the bathroom door, “me running? what a thought… and then falling? Imagine the embarrassment, and even the risk… just a silly dream.”

Now where were we? Oh yea, “why not just stay?” we were asking, well, I think Bruce Springsteen put it best, “Baby we were born to run!”.

Where ya crawling?

Yours in the dreams,

Ben

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