Learning to Walk

For the last week and a half or so, B has been learning to walk. We really started working with him in earnest two Sundays ago, and since then he's made explosive progress. Whereas we used to have to coax him to walk even one step, which was about all he could manage as his balance wasn't the best, almost two weeks later he's walking halfway across the living room at one go. We used to have to initiate the walking attempts by bribing him with toys, affection, or whatever else would get his attention; now, as long as he can pull himself up on something, he'll give walking a shot all on his own. It's amazing to see how quickly he's learning. His first birthday is coming up in about four weeks; it wouldn't surprise me at all if his primary mode of transportation by that point was walking.

But the reason I was really thinking about this is not the actual walking he does, but rather his attitude when he falls down. When you're learning to walk, falling down is a given. When he does inevitably introduce his bum to the floor rather forcefully, he doesn't whine, or frown, or even get very upset. Oh, there are times where he hits his head on a wall or a toy on the floor, or the table legs, or even faceplant into the rungs of the stair rails. He cries. But he doesn't have a bad attitude about the whole thing. Failing once doesn't make him want to give up forever. Failing a hundred times hasn't stopped him from getting up and trying again.

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2760645/Failure

I know what you're thinking: "AnnMarie, hello, that's not really anything extraordinary, babies all learn like that." That's exactly my point! Every child learns every single thing they do -- walking, talking, eating, running, crawling, reading, you name it -- by failing over and over and over and over, hundreds and probably thousands of times in some cases. Up to a certain age, that doesn't seem to discourage or dishearten most kids at all. They just get up (literally or metaphorically) and try again. It's not until we get older, and see that some kids don't fail as much or as often as we do, that we start letting failure get us down. Failing becomes something dirty, even evil, and definitely something looked down on. But what fundamental changes take place between infancy, childhood, and adulthood? Nothing, really. We still learn by failure. Failure teaches us things that success can't, and yet the great majority of us are afraid of it, vilify it, even refuse to do things because of it.

I'm not claiming that I'm not one of those people, because I very definitely am. I think my fear of failing is one of the defining traits of my personality. It has kept me from doing many, many things. I need to get over the feeling that failing is a bad thing. It is in some cases, of course, but most of the time, failing is a chance to learn something. As long as you learn something from your failure, it's not worthless. The real shame in failing is when you let that failure stop you from doing something that you want or need to do. There have been many stories and examples illustrating this principle told to me in my lifetime, but I think the one that has made the biggest impact on me thus far is learning to walk.