"A Child's First Step"

“Failure breeds Success”

A Child’s First Step: An Experience for Life

I traveled back from Aruba yesterday. Having a window seat towards the back of the American Airlines Boeing 757, I was seated near a woman, around sixty, as she sat near her husband. They were headed back to Winnipeg. When we landed in Miami, a young woman in front of us had a young baby clutched close to her body. The child, a girl, was smiling wildly away at the elderly gentleman from Winnipeg who was making grandfatherly expressions towards the baby girl.

The elderly woman then asked the young girl, early twenties, “How old is she?”

“Five months,” the mother responded in a French accent and a proud smile.

“Five months,” was all the elderly Winnipeg woman responded with, not knowing what else to say.

We then started to deplane and I started to think about “A Child’s First Step”.

Most of us have experienced the sight of a toddler learning to walk. The word toddler is derived from the word ‘totter’ meaning to tremble or rock as about to fall. Whether the child was a niece, nephew, child of a friend’s, stranger in the park, one of our own children or a grandchild, most of us have witnessed this event.

Typically, this learning experience is initiated by an adult who wants to teach the child to walk. The “teacher” picks the child up under the arms, tries to help the child balance him or herself on its feet, then walks a couple of steps away with wide open arms encouraging the child to take a few steps knowing the child will fall. The child rocks and ways and usually falls the first several times.

This process is repeated, sometimes for days, until the child is ‘ready’ and then begins to take his or her first few steps. This event is then usually celebrated with phone calls to friends and family and proudly told to neighbors and coworkers over coffee.

I can’t remember back to when I went through this process personally, as most of us can’t. But I believe as a child our psyche is programmed to try new things and the encouragement we get from that single event is a major boost to our self-confidence. Here was a time in our lives it was okay to fall down while learning something. It was okay to ‘fail’ at something and still get the encouragement and support of others. We were taught not to give up.

Somewhere down the line I believe we ‘teachers’ lose sight of that process. We don’t accept that learning process of others ‘toddling’ and maybe evening falling. We become less supportive and more cynical.

Life is a journey of learning. New decisions are made daily with sometimes little information to go by. Mistakes are made. As I look back at my life, and see the mistakes I have made, I am glad I’ve had family and friends to continually encourage me. And you know what, I probably will stumble here and there but I know how to get back up and keep moving on.

Let’s be there for one another and others to get the most out of our journey.

NOTE: Picture is of Rebecca and Sarah in 1995.