We were all infants in the first few years of our life. In the eye of infants, the world is totally unfamiliar. We don’t know what we see, don’t understand the language people are speaking, and even can’t move easily. The world presents so many challenges for us, yet we overcome them one by one without even realizing it. Perhaps one of the biggest achievements for infants is to become able to walk on their own. If we pondering on this, we should all be proud of ourselves. This is so meaningful to our life!
Why do I say so? Well, learning to walk is not an easy deal at all. For infants, they will start from crawling, then pulling up, then cruising, and finally become able to walk on their own. During this procedure, they will fall over numerous times to gain a sense of balance. However, when we are with the baby, we are probably tempted to protect the baby when the baby starts to fall. If we do so constantly, the odds are we are impeding the baby from learning to walk! They may need more time to gain a sense of balance if they don’t fall over very often and learn from their own mistakes.
This teaches us a very important lesson: to really be able to learn something, we probably need to go through a lot of trials and errors, learn from our mistakes, and finally get a deep sense of what it is. When a baby finally becomes able to walk, you can also say that a baby forms so-called “muscle memory” in walking. Similarly, we need to form “muscle memory” in the thing we learn if we ever want to be proficient in it. No matter what you learn, trials and errors are absolutely necessary, and we need to have in-depth experience of it and other people cannot replace us in this process.
Moreover, perhaps there are times when you feel down or doubt yourself whether you’re the right person to do or learn something, think about the baby! They don’t know they will ever be able to walk or not before they really gained the skill to walk. We are constantly facing a similar situation in our life: we don’t know we’ll ever be able to overcome the challenge. However, we can always try to learn it like a baby learns to walk. A baby will only feel capable when they can walk on their own, and so do us! Our confidence in something really comes from the “muscle memory” we build up over time. Before that happens, please just learn it like a baby!
(To be continued)
