Before you learn to fly, learn to fall

When I was really young my parents taught me to ski and one of the things I found I was most interested in learning about is how to get up after falling down skiing as I was very good at falling down. (If you really want to know, to make getting up after falling down skiing easier, hold your arm that's facing down the hill out so it's facing diagonally down the slope and over your skiboots. This puts your weight over the middle of the skis, and means you won't have to push yourself up so much. Then take you uphill arm and put your hand on the snow as close to the uphill ski as possible and push yourself up.) In a way, this showed me that in order to get anywhere, you really needed to know what to do if things went wrong. More importantly, it showed me how important it was to know how to get up again when things went wrong. That's something I've carried with me in my life. I was reminded of all this when I heard a song by Paul Simon called "Learn How To Fall." I really like it because it speaks to how falling down helps us to fly later on. So my message for today is even if you fall, never let it stop you from getting back up again and doing what you want to do!