The last time I roller-skated before the other night was in 5th grade. It was my tenth birthday party and it was only the second time I had been roller-skating and I held the wall the entire time so I wouldn’t fall. For a girl who loved to jump on her bed and jump off her bed into the air doing somersaults, I hate the prospect of falling. No, it wasn’t the fear of embarrassment. I was never afraid of what others would think whether I fell or didn’t. If I was afraid of embarrassment, I wouldn’t be running this blog. I was simply afraid of losing my balance, falling in the wrong way, and breaking my skull, or my spine, or something else important that would render me dead.
If you follow my personal Insta, my writer’s Insta (SamhiC8LovesToWrite), or MML YouTube, you would’ve seen the following video:
Well, here’s my blog post about my revelations post-learning how to skate.
We’ve talked about risks. We’ve talked about how you cannot live without risks. We’ve talked about how even when you supposedly decide to not take a risk, you’re risking something else instead. So, we move onto the next phase of this philosophical pondering: When life is filled with risks, how do you go about being unafraid? More specifically, being unafraid of failure?
Well, you can’t. I mean, not always. Some of us are simply more attuned to living life without a fear of the unknown, the consequences, or the results of sky-diving alone in an abandoned place without checking that our parachutes are working. Others of us are more attuned to, well, not doing that.
But of course, it is not to live without fear, but rather to live with fear and to conquer that fear.
It is not to live without failure, but to fail and learn how to succeed that makes life worthwhile. It didn’t hit me until the first time I finally fell while roller-skating (the other night) that I had to fail. It’s not enough to learn how to skate. You need to learn how to fall as well. You need to learn that it’s better to fall forward so you can catch the ground with your knees rather than falling backwards right onto your spine.
You need to learn that if you go at a certain speed or twist your legs in a certain way, you will fall. You need to learn this so that you don’t go at that certain speed or twist your legs that way so you don’t fall… next time.
Edison apparently said:
Which I already knew.
But I always felt the sentiment was that of an optimist who didn’t want to admit he failed.
But I’m realizing now that that wasn’t the case. I’m realizing that failure is a necessary juxtaposition of success. And what’s more is just as to not to take a risk is to risk something else:
