To be a true horsewoman, you have to fall 7 times.
A Japanese saying: fall 7 times and get up 8.
Bluesman Muddy Waters is reported to have said that the only failed musicians were those who quit.
“If you have made mistakes…there is always another chance for you…you may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call “failure” is not the falling down, but the staying down.”
Mary Pickford
I have only fallen four times from horses so I know I have falls ahead of me–if I have the courage to keep going. One of them may not even count as a fall—it was more like just a slow slide off into soft leaf mold while riding bareback.
What about my courage to face ‘falls’ in my work in schools?How many times have I tried and failed in one way or another? It is a little harder to tell what counts as a ‘fall’ ( or ‘fail’) in my work but I suspect the list, from my perspective, is quite long. There are times when my instructional plan didn’t work. There are times when the work we did was gutted by a change in support from a system.
Like my falls off a horse, so far, none of the falls/fails have killed me here. I’m still here.
For those of us who have some fear of failure, perhaps the answer is that as long as you (metaphorically) continue to get back on the horse, you are a rider, on the way to becoming a better rider, and perhaps most importantly, a more courageous rider each time you learn that you are a person who rises from a fall.