As Helena Iara has been learning to stand and walk, I've discovered that she loves to fall. Not all the time, of course, and she'll cry when her hear hits the floor, but on a nice soft surface, or when she just lands on her butt, she'll look up with a blissful smile. So this weekend, I told her a story of an encounter I had with a teenager living on the street, about a decade ago when I was working with street kids in Santa Fe. Since I wrote a radio commentary about the story back then, I'm going to shamelessly plagiarize myself here:
Last week, one of the homeless kids I work with came into the drop in center elated. A friend had loaned him a snowboard and taken him up to the Santa Fe Ski Basin, and the experience had left a smile on his face that I didn’t think even surgery could remove.
“You’re not just dead?” I asked, remembering my first day on a snowboard, where have a zillion flips over my toe-side edge had left bruises on my palms and sorer muscles than anything else I could remember.
His smile grew a touch more thoughtful. “Sure, I crashed a lot, but I’m good at falling.”
Several days later, the same kid came in. Perhaps he had gone to the plastic surgeon, I thought at first, because that permanent smile had been completely effaced. We talked for a while, played a game of chess, and finally, slowly, the truth began to come out. The sort of truth that fulfills everyone’s nightmare.
Several months before, an acquaintance had invited him and his girlfriend to sleep on his floor for the winter. At the time, it had seemed a kind gesture. But then, yes, the hero of my story walked in on his girlfriend and their host. Naked. In bed.
My heart contracted. He moved his knight to put my king in check.
“I’m so impressed with how you’re handling this,” I said, reaching for any good thing to say, any silver lining to the blackest cloud a young man can have pass in front of the sun.
“Remember what I told you?” he asked. “I’m good at falling.”
If there’s any truth to the old saw about how suffering builds character, it’s in those few words. And unfortunately, because life has become so easy for most middle and upper class Americans, we have no chance to learn how to fall. I imagine an average kid thrown into the same circumstances -- he would demand years of therapy, a prescription for Zoloft, and a new puppy. For a kid who’s been homeless for years, who’s been knifed in the back by his father -- sure, the experience is further evidence that life sucks, but it does not destroy him.
On the streets, among the orphans, the girls who were sexually abused for years, the gay boys kicked out of the house by their dads, and children from families too poor to support them, there are also some rich kids. The life of Jack Kerouac seems romantic to them, and they might talk about the joys of the open road, but in truth, they want to learn how to fall. Most children from American families have no chance to find out what they’re made of, to see if they are worthy of themselves.
So in the end, there’s a simple lesson and a more complicated application. We all need to learn how to fall better -- the question is how.
Maybe I’ll try snowboarding again.
This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.
You can see why I'm so excited that Helena is learning to fall.
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