Falling Down

Five days have gone by, and I can finally sit down without grimacing. It was a beautiful sunny Saturday morning, and I was on a ski trip with one of my Italian youth groups. And then, at the ski shop, it occurred to the kids that it would be awesome to learn how to snowboard….

Which meant that I had to learn how to snowboard. Of course, I could have taken the easy way out. Just ski while they boarded. But in a burst of enthusiasm I too rented a snowboard and trailing behind our instructor with my Italian kids, hit the slopes. Literally. 

Learning to stand up? You fall. Getting off the lift? You fall. Finally going down the hill? You fall. Learning to turn heel-side? Toe-side? You fall. Of course, there are also different falling styles. The two most common are tailbone and face-plant. Somewhere between learning to turn heel-side and toe-side, still trying to breathe in after a particularly hard tailbone-style fall, I had this incredible sense of déjà-vu. I had done this before….

Pain is something we’ve all felt many times. Falling down always hurts. But there’s a special type of pain that’s not bad: growing pain. And through all my impromptu sit-downs on the ski slopes, I was experiencing a particular type of growing pain, a type that I had felt before. Budding virtue.

Virtues are solid habits that help us make the right decisions. Like strong muscles, they make it easier to get where we want to go. But just like building muscle means pumping iron, growing in virtue is hard because it means trying to do something that we can’t do… yet. With every attempt, we grow in virtue. That hope of someday breaking through and succeeding is what drives us on even when the going gets tough. I keep at it in spite of the pain because on the other side of the wall lies a better me (more on life’s walls here). 

The growing pains of virtue are special. Unlike a lot of the other knocks that life has in store for us, we can always avoid the difficulties of forging virtue. We can be cowards instead of strong, spiteful instead of forgiving, selfish instead of generous. Or just plain mediocre. However, we know where those doors lead. We’ve used them before. And we don’t want to take them.

Back in the Alps, I picked myself up and took another stab at the toe-side turn. My tailbone was still scared stiff of the next fall, but I wanted to snowboard.

By Benjamin O'Loughlin