“Daddy, I don’t like bicycles,” Ethan declared.
Photo by Rebecca Chalmers
“Why?” I asked.
“Because bicycles are hard,” he fumed, laying in the grass from another failed attempt.
“That’s true. Bicycles are hard.” I had to admit.
Everything is hard when we have never done it. We don’t learn by getting it right. We learn by getting it wrong. We fall a lot. Sometimes we fall in the grass. Sometimes we fall on the hard hot asphalt. Falling is never fun. Falling is almost always worse when you fall alone.
“But you’re not doing it by yourself, Buddy.” He didn’t like what I had to say. Not from where he lay plopped in the grass. We rarely do. But he had to admit I was right. Dad is always right. Right? No of course not. If I get anything right, it’s most likely because I’ve screwed it up enough to lose count.
As he sat in the grass frustrated I could tell we were on the verge of something. My son was close to quitting. He was close to letting himself forever be the boy in the grass instead of the boy on the bike. Sure, this was after a few failed attempts, but who hasn’t crashed and burned trying to learn to ride?
You didn’t learn anything by nailing it on your first attempt either. Who does? I’m sure there are exceptions; but that’s not the point.
I had to try something. I knelt down in the grass next to him, bad knees screaming.
“Hey buddy, do you see where you are?” I asked.
He gave me one of those exasperated kid looks. You know—the kind dripping with equal parts concern for my sanity and confusion. “We—are—in the YARD!” He yelled.
“Of course we are,” I said, “but that’s not what I meant. Do you see how far you’ve come?”
He looked up for the first time at the tracks he’d made through the short grass. It was a clear trail. The first ten yards toward a lifetime of riding a bike on his own.
“Do you see it?” I prodded. He looked for a moment and then nodded, but I could tell he wasn’t convinced. “You’re not where you started. You did it. You rode a bike on your own.”
I didn’t give him a trophy and declare him a world champion. I didn’t scold him for not going all the way. I praised his success. And it was a success. One he would never have realized without a sudden fall in the grass.
He got back up. He got back on the bike. It wasn’t the only time he fell. But it was the last time he almost quit. And he rode further with every attempt.
Plenty of people spend their lives in the bleachers celebrating when someone falls. Don’t stay in the stands. Get down in the grass with someone who needs you. Be the one telling them how far they’ve come.
Maybe your friend needs a reminder. Tell him he isn’t his struggling business. Call your brother and let him know how great you think it was he tried something incredible. Show him how far he has come. Hold your wife’s hand for an hour and talk about a brave thing she did. Aim the ones you love at the tracks they’ve made rather than the place they might have landed. Your words like a firm grip will help them get back up.
Don’t act like you have it all together either. Instead of posting your highlight reel snap a pic of your glaring failure. Put that on Instagram.
It’s easy to be loud about someone else’s failure. The louder we are the harder it is to remember what it was like laying in the grass. But when we’re all loud, we’re all just lying in the grass.
Stand up. Brush yourself off. And offer words that pick up a friend. Tell someone how far they’ve come.