O for Opportunity

Over the past year, on my bike, I have fallen countless times. I have fallen at high speeds and low. I have fallen turning a corner at 20 miles an hour, and I have fallen at the perilous speed of nearly zero miles an hour.

I have fallen on asphalt, grass, and gravel. I have fallen, in no particular order, and in many various quantities, on my elbows, my knees, my thighs, my head, my shoulders, my wrists, and my hands. 

I have fallen trying to speed up, and I have fallen trying to slow down. I have fallen going uphill and down. I have fallen while going so slow that I could have just stepped off the bike. 

I have fallen in front of people. I have fallen in front of so many people. I have fallen in front of a single person so engrossed by their phone that they did not see me falling. 

I have fallen in front of a family of tourists in a Park, and then I have gotten up and fallen again. I have fallen, while white-knuckling the brakes, gently and sideways into a fence while a herd of children clutching a communal leash waddled past me. 

I have fallen in front of a mother and her baby. I have also fallen in front of no one, in the sheer absence of a soul, alone in a parking lot in the early morning, after having bumped into a traffic cone. 

I have, in the process of falling, said the same chorus of things, all at the same resigned volume, never too loud. I have fallen and said oop. I have fallen and said ah, shit. I have fallen and apologized. 

It is a somewhat-scientific, often-disputed fact that learning gets harder as you age. The brain becomes less plastic at a certain point, yes, but really what I’d argue is that adulthood sets in, and with it comes the monotonous mundanity of accepting the person you have taken into adulthood: yourself. 

No longer does this world afford you, an adult who is supposed to have their shit together, the strangely wide and luminous space allotted to children, that whimsical and imaginative place where scrapes can be kissed away and where the letter A resembles aardvarks and where what is broken can be fixed, even forgotten. 

As a child, you fly down the hill that once sent you crashing. The number for poison control is on the fridge. You don’t grow up until you have to. 

And then there you are: grown up, your nature rooted, wide trunk in a storm. Try to move. You can’t. You grow from the thing you are. And always, you remain yourself. Ah, fuck.

People often link adulthood and maturity, adulthood and strength, adulthood and something resembling confidence. Personally, I have nearly always associated adulthood with fear and shame. I have learned, as an adult, less about what I am capable of and more about the opposite. 

I have learned about my capacity for cruelty and the sense of safety I find in shame, how I have sometimes used the shame I feel about myself to excuse myself for what I’ve done wrong, little self-deprecating jokester I can be, little not worth it kind of boy. 

There; I’m doing it again. I have learned how hard it is to commit to something, anything, other than the usual—the way I let my resentments build without speaking about them, the way I hide, over and over again, the parts of me I hate the most, even though I have said, over and over again, that I will allow someone to try to understand them. 

Over time, as a result of this learning that hasn’t always translated into change, I have found a kind of grace that I have extended to people from afar, people who I have heard have gotten sober, people who have logged off every account, people who have leaned into an imaginative practice of wondering how this life could be different, and then who have stopped leaning, and have taken that step. Through all of this thinking and realizing and learning, I have not known how to ride a bike. 

To err is baby elephant, tripping over her trunk, right? It’s a beautiful image; it reaches back to childhood and brings it into the present. 

It unsets me in my ways, breaking me free from the idea that stumbling can’t be lovely—adorable, even, maybe not even something worthy of shame. 

It grants me forgiveness for being myself, baby elephant I sometimes am. For a long time I have been set in my ways. I have walked where I have needed to go; if I have needed to get there faster, I have run; if I have needed to get farther, I have asked someone to drive me.

Even in a car, I have confused my left blinker for my right; I have confused blinkers for wipers; I have pretended to know how to adjust my mirrors instead of asking for advice. I have slammed on the brakes, and I have rolled through a stop sign. 

There is something about learning, about admitting I don’t know, that brings you back into that space of childhood, with its mix of excitement and possibility and fear and shame. 

There is something about being a beginner again. On Reddit, where I lurk in the days after my lesson for tips about how to start riding a bike, someone says the best time to plant a tree is years ago; the second best time is now. 

I want to scoff at this random commenter, but I can’t. It’s 10 at night and I’m sitting by the window with my computer on my lap, and I almost want to cry. We pretend at certainty all of the time, even in the stumbling that life almost always is.

I have always felt a little stunted for not knowing how to do two seemingly simple things. I have always felt a little off. I want to know how to do things, but I also know how long such learning takes. Older, I know that falling is part of learning. I’m scared of falling. I’m scared of trying and not succeeding. I’m scared of it all.

It is hard, I think, to learn as an adult. This is not some profound statement. It just is. But it is not hard because of the fact of it; it is hard because learning anything means learning again how to learn.

It’s not that riding a bike is hard; it’s that learning is hard. Learning requires something of us. It requires our patience, yes. It requires, also, our humility. 

When you are older, falling means more than pain. It means failure, and shame. It means having, sometimes sadly, the self and contextual awareness to see yourself outside of yourself, so that when you fall, you don’t really fall once.

When you fall, you perform the act of falling, and then you also—at the very same time—see yourself falling. You fall twice, three times even. You fall infinitely, extending the act of your fall into the eyes of whoever you think—or care—will notice.

You fall forever multiplied by a billion. Because part of growing up means growing up with shame. It means growing up with doubt. You remember all you do not know, that one time you blurted out that awful joke, that time you sort of shat yourself in the hospital bed, and had to call the nurse for a new gown.

You scold yourself for all of it; you think more of the mess you’ve made than anything else. You think it can be seen by anyone’s eyes. You are a video on loop, falling and falling again. The world makes you feel ashamed enough each day; why make yourself feel it by trying to learn?

Learning, I think, makes you forget, and this forgetting is a beautiful thing. You forget what you were. You forget how you defined yourself, and how you defined the world.

You forget that you once told yourself that there was no such thing as possibility, that you were who you were. You forget, for a small and gorgeous instant, your shame.

The fact of life being what it is, life, which means birth, which means you are not stuck, which means yes, you can learn, which means no, it is not always exactly how you think it is, which means where is the fun in that, which means that I love you, little body you call your own, little trying thing, little learning thing. I’m proud.

So, I am here to tell you that it works sometimes, this learning thing, this unending thing we call a life until it ends. Yes, let me tell you; it does.

I haven’t written anything here for over 8 months now. For excuses that morphed into reasons and for unavoidable reasons, blame adulting. There are times I’ve felt like just deleting this whole blog thing, not wanting to write anything ever again. But you know why I didn’t? Because you’re still here reading this. 

I’ve run out of creative juice God knows how many times. I’ve wanted to write entertaining stories, stories that’ll leave you wheezing and out of breath. But sometimes it’s just not easy. I look at my unsaved drafts and I see ‘FAILURE’ in caps and bold.

Over the past few months, on so many mornings, I have opened a google document and stared at the blinking cursor.  And I have my hands on my keyboard and start typing away until I feel what I want to feel, which is not quite pain yet, not quite suffering, but something approaching it: my happy place, my little canvas of expression. 

And I type. And I breathe. I am who I am: broken thing, moving thing, learning thing. And for an instant, I feel beautiful. I feel reminded that I learned this new part of myself, that I didn’t know it before, that I am capable of such change.

If you asked me months or years ago, I would have come up with some joke, something self-deprecating, something rooted in the self to tell you why I didn’t feel capable of expanding myself.

I would have said I am not that good a writer, I just try. There are far better writers out there with good content you should be on the lookout for.

But then there was the learning, by which I mean that there were the edits, changing of stories, and the little embarrassments. There was the friend, always texting me, looking forward to the next article—did you stop writing?

There is still so much I don’t know. I don’t know when I will get that book of mine published, though I know that I will, and I know that, when I have it, I will be, once again, a grown man with something to show off.

I don’t know how to write captivating and interesting stories like my favorite authors. But I do know that I can learn. I know that much. That I am a learning thing, and that what I learn is both in my control and out of it.

I think of all I have learned how to cope with that I haven’t wanted to. And you, too. Right? 

All you have learned how to cope with that you haven’t wanted to. But you’ve learned, haven’t you? You’ve learned how to cope. Which also means you’ve learned—and are still learning—how to live.

Hey, it’s August. Time flies by and you haven’t crossed half of your checklist for the year. But remember, a man’s ambition is his greatest comfort. Men with ambition and satisfaction in working will never feel lost or lonely.

Working on yourself bit by bit is the warmest blanket during the coldest times. Find your purpose and become ambitious. Bless yourself.

Longreads: Stumbling Can Be Lovely