Falling on one's buttocks

Today I fell squarely on my buttocks, because my landlord's draconian solution for keeping people off his newly growing patch of grass is to block off an entire section of steps on the shortcut I use to walk to my apartment. To walk around The Rope of Futility, I had to descend steeply from some stones, whereupon I slipped and fell.

While cursing my landlord's penchant for finding "solutions" that cause more problems than they solve, I thought about how I had learned to fall down in Taekwondo class (ages ago, when I still trained in Taekwondo). The lesson was extremely useful, and there was something really beautiful about the premise of the lesson: "You WILL fall, at some point, so you'd better learn how to do it properly."

And that premise has proven true so many times, both literally and figuratively. I'm starting to see that there's an intrinsic value to falling, although perhaps there was not much value in today's incident. When you fall a lot, you get good at it.

I fell all the time, for example, when I was an undergraduate at Caltech. The most valuable things I learned at Caltech weren't anything that could be found in a textbook or problem set. It was realizing that I wasn't that smart. (In fact, in comparison to a lot of my classmates, I was really stupid). It was having to work really, really hard all the time so that maybe I could start to grasp some of the things I was supposed to learn. It was staring at question one on a test and not having any idea how to attack it, looking at question 2 and having the same feeling, then looking at question 3 and panicking. These things were huge blows at first, because I'd been a straight-A honor student all my life before that. But after a while, it wasn't so bad. I learned to deal with it.


At Caltech, I knew at some level that these experiences were good for me, but I didn't really appreciate how good it was to fall hard until I'd met people who hadn't yet. Later in life, I met people who throughout their entire life, inclusive of both undergraduate and graduate school, had been the smartest people they'd ever met. Everything came easily to them and they never had to struggle to understand anything. They were the smartest people they'd ever met and everything came easily to them not because they were super geniuses, but because they'd never been challenged. And they'd never cared to challenge themselves. They liked being the smartest people they'd ever met, which is really sad.

By the time they were challenged for the very first time (for example, by their first demanding job), they were already well into adulthood. And these people, rather than being boosted by confidence from being the best their whole lives, fall really really hard. I've seen some of them break down and cry because they can't handle not being the best. They can't handle having to struggle and working hard in order to understand or accomplish something.

So Lori Gottlieb's article in the Atlantic ("How to Land Your Kid In Therapy"; July/August 2011 issue) resonated well with me. Gottlieb described her observations as a psychologist. Many of her patients seemed to have great childhoods and great parents, but they were really unhappy as adults even though there appeared to be nothing to be unhappy about. When Gottlieb delved deeper, it appeared that these patients often had one thing in common - parents that were overprotective of their childrens' self-esteem, the kind of parents who call a teacher and ask that she not use a red pen when correcting their child's homework because red ink makes their child anxious, who come running and comforting the minute their toddler starts to cry, who would rather have their child be labeled with a learning disability to explain non-stellar academic performance than have their child be branded "average." This overprotection of self-esteem, Gottlieb argues, is bad for children because they don't learn how to deal with real life, which is much different than the kind of lives their parents are preparing them for.

These children grew up to be adults who were unprepared to deal with any setbacks in life, even relatively minor ones. In other words, they don't know how to get back up because they don't know how to fall.