Never Stay Down

Imagine that you’re walking on a city sidewalk on your way to run an errand.  You’re walking with a purposeful stride, the sun is out, life is good, and you’re on a mission to get things done.  As your head is on a swivel taking in your surroundings at eye level, there is chip in the sidewalk ahead of you.  It’s sitting there with impending misfortune for your next few steps and you’re completely unaware of the foreshadowing that is about to become reality.  The toe of your shoe catches the jagged sidewalk and you stumble and fall to the ground.  After gathering yourself, you stare back at the chip that led to your demise with severe disdain as you check your hands, elbows and knees.  With no physical damage done, your cheeks are a bit flushed with embarrassment.  Then without a second thought, you get up and continue on your way to reach your destination.  I take you through this scenario because we’ve all experienced something similar, and in each situation we always get up and continue on our way after we stumble or fall. 

Life is full of unexpected chipped sidewalks laying in our paths as we pursue our goals.  Sometimes it’s the loss of a job, failing a class, a break up/divorce, financial struggles or anything else that we don’t anticipate that makes us stumble and fall on our path through life.  But similar to the above scenario as if it was an actual chip in the sidewalk that we stumbled on, we need to get back up and continue on our way.

When life’s unforeseen obstacles make us fall, our pride might take a hit and quite often there is some pain that comes with it.  Sure it may hurt for a while or we might be lucky and it’s a short lived pain.  Ultimately however, it will not hurt forever, and we can heal from those heartaches and pains that make us feel like a failure, or that we aren’t good enough.  What matters most is that we don’t give up moving forward and just sit there stationary in our lives because of one misstep.  Imagine if you were still sitting in the spot where you last tripped and fell on the ground.  There’s no way that you would sit on that sidewalk for days, months or years without getting up.  So if you wouldn’t let that happen, then let’s not get stuck in the rut we’ve fallen in after getting knocked down in life.

Sure it seems easy for me to say to you from outside the box as I sit behind my laptop writing this, because I don’t know your story or what you’re going through.  But I do know that you’re a strong person and so am I, and we’ve all survived difficult times in our lives before.  Quite often it is very tough when we’re in a situation to see a way out of it, but we’ve survived hardships before, so we can do it again!  This isn’t the first and it certainly won’t be the last time we stumble and fall, so let’s get back up and keep on pursuing that dream, chasing that goal, and making a difference before we stumbled and fell.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through experience it’s that life doesn’t always go the way we’ve planned it.  It’s filled with those cracked sidewalks to make us trip, and fall, and it’s filled with plenty of detours as well.  The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but there’s always a detour when it comes to life and it certainly isn’t always linear. 

That’s when we need to dig deep within ourselves to find that intrinsic motivation and refocus on our goals.  Figure out what our true motivation was at the beginning of our journey before we fell.  This is the first step to help picking ourselves back up.  Sometimes there is some pain in getting back up, and we need others to help us out.  It feels dependent, when all we want is independence, but there’s nothing wrong with that.  That’s the time when we look to family and friends, people in our community, or our social/professional network that can help get us back on our feet after getting knocked down.  Other times we need to pay a little more attention to the details and maybe retry something with a little more effort but just slightly change it.  Then the next time that chip in the sidewalk gets closer, we can step right over it, and keep on walking.

It’s important to remember that no matter what, we should not stay down.  We need to take some time to make sure we’re ok and ready to get back up.  Then make it happen, and stand stronger than ever while moving forward with the purpose and determination headed in the direction of success that we were moving towards before we fell.