Last night my daughter was dancing around the house after coming home from her dance class. She was leaping and joyfully twirling in her black leotard and lavender tights, when suddenly she slipped and quickly tumbled to the ground. I thought there may be tears that accompanied the sudden, unexpected fall onto our hardwood floors. Instead, without skipping a beat, she began spinning and moving her arms and legs expressively while still on the floor. “Are you ok?” I asked her as she continued to move on the ground. “Yeah,” she replied. “I fell, so I made it part of my dance!”

I found myself once again in awe of the endless wisdom of my children’s words and the life lessons they have me reflect upon. I think so often when we fall, whether physically or metaphorically in a more psycho-social experience, we see it as a negative experience; a barrier that has gotten in our way and has stopped us from what we wanted to do. Typically when we view something we are experiencing as problematic and negative, we will engage with that experience in a way that feeds that internal narrative and perpetuates the fall as a problem. We may give up, we may think it unfair, and we may resist the fact that the fall even occurred. 

But there’s a different way to engage with a fall. If we meet our falls with curiosity, compassion, and even a sense of playfulness, we are likely to recover from the fall more quickly and to have a positive outlook about what happened. We can tend to the physical or emotional parts of ourselves that got hurt, and we can move forward. 

In my daughter’s case, she embraced the fall. She knew she was okay, and rather than let it stop her, she incorporated it into the beauty she was creating in her dance. She used the fall to continue moving and to make it part of her experience. If we can view falls as part of, rather than a disruption to, our stories, there is a lot more space for us to learn from the fall and to keep moving forward as we’d like to, perhaps even dancing.