Mindset: Falling Up The Stairs

Life often seems like its uphill. Sometimes it’s a rolling slope, sometimes a cliff face with no spots for grip, sometimes a quickly moving escalator, sometimes it’s Sisyphean (comes with boulder), but most often I feel like it’s a really long set of stairs.  Stairs are tiring, and I’m clumsy so I trip a lot. Sometimes you fall down the stairs, and sometimes you fall up the stairs.

Yeah, in my life literally and figuratively I have fallen down a lot of stairs. Work hard, get set up, something happens, bam- I’m falling backward again. Make plans, things don’t go according to plan, bam- take a tumble. Do therapy, get triggered, big emotional fall down the stairs. Literally I could also name off the top of my head three or four staircases I have fallen all the way down also. However, the beauty of figurative stairs is only inside bruises- no broken bones, no bleeding, no real scars. Just things to heal inside, and lessons to learn. And if we learn our lessons from figurative stairs, then we didn’t really fall all the way back to the bottom. We might have fallen all the way back to the first or second step, but learning means we didn’t fall back to the ground where we started.

Falling up the stairs always makes me feel even more dumb. Falling downstairs? Yeah, gravity takes you down. Many ways to fall- miss a step, slip, trip, stair gives way, hit your head on something (I’m very tall) and get knocked off balance, going too fast, etc. Upstairs- you’re bopping up the stairs, then out of nowhere you catch your foot and FLOP. You’re on your face. You know what though? You’re still on the next step. You still advanced. It might take a second to get over the shock or pain that you experience; maybe you need a moment to recoup before you are back on your feet to get back to your figurative (or literal) ascension, but you made it up another stair still. Maybe you even slid back down a couple stairs but you didn’t make it all the way back down. That’s progress still.

You have to realize that life is rarely a steady path. Like the Buddhist symbol of the unalome, life is forward and backward and twists and turns that all lead you to your path of enlightenment. Either way you fall on your stairs, as long as you learned something then you’ve gained ground. When life is moving there are going to be trips and falls but realize when you’re sliding down the staircase or when you’ve simply just fallen up to the next step, and you have to check the situation and come up with a plan to get back up. If you need a moment, take it. If it hurt, cry. Cuss. Grab onto the handrail (it’s ok to ask for or accept help) and get back moving. Try to fall up more than down, and even if you fall down realize where you came from and the progress you’ve made and lessons you’ve learned and with that you can never be where you started again- you’re always a step up.

Sometimes it seems like life for other people is a graceful dance of leaping from one stepping stone to the next, carried by the wind with ease, bounding from opportunity to opportunity, never looking down or back and never worrying where to land. However, if you’re like me it it’s more like hurling yourself from rock to rock, sometimes barely clinging onto the rock, pulling yourself up, having the air knocked out, probably ripped your pants- maybe even peed a little, you don’t know where the next rock is, sometimes the rock is actually a log that’ll sink if you’re there too long, sometimes the rock is an alligator (Frogger reference), and sometimes it’s a blind jump into fog hoping to find footing while you’re in the air. Sometimes life seems like an up escalator and you’re holding onto the handrail listening to pleasant music, and sometimes you’re trying really hard to get up a down escalator that’s going really fast and eventually you’ll make it to the top- sweaty and out of breath but you’re there. Sometimes you walk up the stairs, sometimes you fall down the stairs, and sometimes you fall up the stairs- but whatever you’re doing just keep moving. You’ll get there in your own timing. And as long as I’m mostly falling up the stairs then I’m learning to be ok with that.