On Falling and Rising

Her marriage had imploded, leaving her a divorced, single mother, dependent on welfare to get her from day-to-day.  She was severely depressed, and things felt so bad to her that she considered suicide.  To make matters worse, perhaps, she also was an aspiring author.  She said ever since she had learned what a writer was, she wanted to be one.  So she would take her baby and a number of yellow legal pads down to a local coffee shop, where the baby would sleep in her carriage, and the woman would nurse one coffee, and write.

She finally did finish the novel she’d been working on, but then couldn’t find a publisher.  Some say she was rejected 9 times, others 12, but it is certain that the head of the publishing house that finally did pick the book up never actually read the manuscript himself.  He’d given it to his eight year old daughter, who proceeded to nag him for months, wanting to know what happened next. 

And, so, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published.

As far back as the 5^th century B.C.E., the Chinese Philosopher Confucius was teaching, “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”  Nanakorobi Yaoki is a Japanese saying that translates as, “Fall seven times; rise eight times.”  (This is metaphoric, of course.  It’s not the physical act of “falling” and “rising” that we’re talking about here, but the “falling” and “rising” of our spirits, of our courage, of our resolve, of our living.)

There are so many stories about people who proved that on that eighth time rising miraculous things can happen.  (A quick search turned up hundreds of such stories, and I’ve got tell you – editing them down to the one’s I’m going to tell you was really, really hard.)  Here are a few:

• Harrison Ford was told by movie execs that he simply didn’t have what it takes to be a star

• Before I Love Lucy, Lucille Ball was widely regarded as a failed actress, nothing more than a B movie star.  Even her drama instructors didn’t feel she could make it, telling her to try another profession.

• Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because, “he lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”   But he went on to start … a number of businesses that didn’t last too long and ended with bankruptcy and failure.

• After an aspiring actor’s first screen test, an MGM Testing Director noted, “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.” He was talking about Fred Astaire.

• Emily Dickinson wrote almost 1800 works, yet had fewer than a dozen poems published in her lifetime.

• Madeleine L'Engle's, A Wrinkle in Time was rejected 26 times before it was picked up.

• Early in Elvis Presley’s career, the manager of the Grand Ole Opry fired him after just one performance, saying, “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.”

• William Golding’s book Lord of the Flies. — often included on lists of best novels ever written — was rejected 21 times.

• Robert Pirsig’s highly influential, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was turned down 121.

• Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, was rejected 30 times.  In his early days, King has said, he would take all of the rejection notes he got and put them on a nail in the wall.  Eventually there were so many that the nail fell down.  So, he replaced it with a spike and kept on writing.

Nanakorobi Yaoki Whether they knew the words or not, all of these people fell a whole lot more than seven times, and all of them rose at least one more time than they fell.

Three more stories.  (I can’t resist):

• Ludwig van Beethoven’s teachers thought he was hopeless and would never succeed as either a violinist or a composer.

• Thomas Edison’s earliest teachers thought that he was “too stupid to learn anything,” and he was fired from his first two jobs for not being productive enough. And you may have heard the famous story that when working to create the filament for his incandescent light, he made something like 1,000 attempts before finally getting it right.  When asked how he dealt with so much failure he said, “I never failed.  I successfully discovered 1,000 ways it wouldn’t work.”

• This last story is one of someone who is perhaps best known for his starring role in the seminal film Space Jam, or maybe because he’s often referred to as the greatest basketball player who ever lived, Michael Jordan has said, “I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” 

Look at it from either side: “I never failed.  I successfully discovered 1,000 ways it wouldn’t work.” or “I have failed over and over again in my life.  And that is why I succeed.”  It essentially comes down to Nanakorobi Yaoki and the promise that if only we can rise more than we fall …

I would wager that most of us haven’t faced situations as dramatic as these, yet I’d also bet that we’ve all had times in our lives when we felt as if the cards were stacked against us, as though nothing would – or could – go right, as though we knew that other shoe was going to drop pretty soon (and that there was an infinite amount of shoes after that one).  No doubt most of us have been knocked down more than once, and I know that in my own life there’ve been times when I thought I just simply didn’t have it in me to get up again.  Any of you been there?

Now keep in mind: the reason the stories I’ve just shared are so inspiring is that we know the outcome.  We know what the people in them didn’t know at the time, because at the time most of those people probably felt just as badly as we do when we’ve been knocked down (or out).   They did not know that success was around the corner.  After Carrie was rejected so many times, Stephen King gave up, and threw the manuscript in the garbage.  It’s a good thing that his wife fished it out and encouraged him to try again, because he’s now published more than 90 books. At the time, though, he had no idea of what lay ahead of him.  At the time, all of that rejection, all of that “failure,” all of that falling down was as devastating for him as it can be for us.

Brené Brown, who has her own story of falling and rising, has put it quite simply, “The truth is that falling hurts. The dare is to keep being brave and feel your way back up.”  There it is.  When you don’t know how things could possibly turn out okay in the end, all we know is that falling down hurts.  Because it does.  It hurts a lot. 

So it’s no wonder that a whole lot of people simply stop daring, stop taking risks, stop … well … stop starting up again when all that we know has come to a grinding halt.  “The truth is that falling hurts. The dare is to keep being brave and feel your way back up.”

I recently read somewhere that that Japanese proverb has a second part.  Fall seven times.  Rise eight times.  Your life begins today.

That is why we are encouraged to rise that eighth time.  That is the reason we’re told to get up again even when getting up seems like the last thing we can possibly do, the last thing we can possibly want to do because the falling down has hurt so much and we really don’t want to get hurt any more.

The author, historian, and philosopher, Will Durant, collaborated with his equally impressive wife, Ariel Durant, in writing the 11-volume work, The Story of Civilization.  I’d imagine that after all that he’d know a thing or two about the human experience.  Here’s something he said:

“Forget mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you are going to do right now, and do it. Today is your lucky day.”

It is worth our continuing to risk falling, to actually experience falling, and failing, over and over again, because, no matter how many times we’ve fallen, when we rise again our lives can begin again.  Living this way is worth the risks because the promise of a new start, the promise of a new path, the promise of a (re)new(ed) life is waiting for us.  This is true whether we’re talking about individuals or a community like this.  Taking the risk – the risk of falling, the risk of failing, the risk of hurting is worth it because of what we can find on the other side.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

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