This post is also available in: Español (Spanish)
Life is complex, and that’s a fact! Even when I choose to live inside my big pink bubble and wear rose-colored glasses, I’m completely aware that I’ll encounter various challenges from time to time, and I’ll fall at some point. So, if we all know this fact, can we find a way to prepare for the inevitable fall? Personally, I think some of the beauty of life is not knowing what’s coming next. “Uncertainty” is a difficult word for those of us with controlling personalities to process, but deep inside we know it’s part of the deal when we’re sent to this beautiful, messy journey called life.
Falling becomes a part of our lives from birth, and I mean that literally. We learn to walk by falling down, and as I have mentioned before, we have zero fear of falling when we’re that little. As we grow up, falling becomes more complicated because it isn’t physical anymore (well, most of the time—my ankle would beg to differ right now). Still, usually as adults we experience more emotional and mental falls.
Those types of falls are far more difficult to deal with because we need to analyze them more and overcome wounds that we didn’t even know existed. What might be considered emotional or mental falls? Well, the fastest answer to that question would be everything that takes us down. Some examples are losing a loved one, separation, getting fired, divorce, sickness, financial instability, any kind of frustration, and everything in between. So many different things can take us down emotionally and mentally that falling becomes just part of our nature.
I’m not being negative, by the way. This is just reality. Now, you might be wondering, “What is the beauty of falling?” Getting up and learning from it, of course. The same way we learn to walk by getting up every time we fall down, we learn to ride the journey of life by overcoming every single fall we experience. In case you haven’t noticed (and most of us don’t), every time you encounter a challenge that takes you down, you become more resilient, and you also gain experience for future situations.
If you’ve been reading my posts for a while, you know how much I love sharing life lessons I take from my daily routines and experiences. You also know that I tend to deeply analyze some of the most challenging exercises I do during my workouts. Today is no exception. Here I go!
I’ve been working my upper body a lot lately, since I’m still recovering from my ankle injury. Most women don’t pay that much attention to their upper bodies. In fact, usually when you ask a female gym enthusiast what she likes to train the most, she’ll say her lower body, more specifically legs and glutes. Anyway, I’ve been forced to focus my attention on my upper body these past weeks, and one particular exercise got my attention; it’s perfect for a life-related analysis. The exercise is an eccentric pull up. This move basically consists of doing the last part of the pull up (meaning the fall, or going down) very slowly.
The challenge is for me to control my body so I don’t just fall all the way down, and to convince my mind to learn how to fall in a controlled way. I was asked to do this movement for at least 30 seconds. Let me tell you—it isn’t easy! I really had to fight my mind a lot. The first few times I attempted to do it I wasn’t able to hold it for even 15 seconds. However, I kept practicing until I slowly learned to fall in a very controlled way. I’m able to do it in 38 seconds now, and I’m practicing to be able to do it in one minute.
Now, I can hear you saying, “What’s the life lesson here, Irene?” It’s this: we don’t control when or how we’re going to fall in life. But we can get mentally stronger with every situation we encounter so that the next time we fall, we know what to do to control our reaction and not allow our minds to immediately take us all the way down. Learning to fall means we become capable of getting mentally stronger and reacting in a more structured way. That way, our fall looks and feels beautiful, even when we are going down.
We can’t avoid falling down in life completely, but it is definitely possible for all of us to make something beautiful out of every fall and something even more beautiful every time we get up. We must keep working on our minds until we get to that amazing point where we understand how they operate. Once we know how our own minds work, we become free.
We can’t control what’s going to happen, but we need to learn how to control our reactions. Being able to consciously react to the fastballs and curveballs life throws at us is the key to obtaining that inner peace for which we are always searching. Let’s keep learning how to fall, my friends!
Love,
Irene
