The Fear of Falling

When we fall we learn to stop being so afraid.

I’m currently nursing a rather painful skin wound on my knee after an intense bike crash, and I’m fucking thrilled about it.

I live in a rather beautiful rural area, a small valley in the gently upward sloping foothills of the Ardennes. There is a train servicing a village 5 kilometers from me, but otherwise, because I do not drive, everything requires long walks or less long bike rides to where I’d like to go.

So I mostly bike a lot. I bike to the gym, to the grocery store, to nearby streams, to the beginnings of forest trails, and to the train station if I’d like to go farther than my bike can easily take me.

I’ve ridden bikes for most of my life, and still find them to be one of the few really brilliant inventions humans have come upon. You move because of your legs and feet but faster, and balance upon a linear plane only because you are moving.

It’s like flying, but you are always on the ground, which is best because I’m terrified of heights.

I’ve never thought much about that fear until quite recently. It’s not a particularly crippling phobia for me, since for the most part I avoid experiences where I might feel vertigo. I have no reason to visit skyscrapers, and am not very often on mountain cliffs, so overall I forget I’m terrified at all.

I was reminded a few months ago, though. It was my birthday, and my sister—who had rented a house for a week in Switzerland—invited my partner and I to come to celebrate. I’d never been before, and I love mountains, and we had nothing else planned, so my partner agreed to drive us for that visit.

Driving through Switzerland is as gorgeous as you probably imagine it is. The land slopes ever upward from the lower plains of Germany until you are suddenly surrounded by visions out of The Lord Of The Rings. It’s also much like traveling through the Rockies or the Cascades in the United States, with the exception that the slopes and vales are settled with ancient Swiss villages, rather than American strip-malls and fast food chains.

The last hour of the trip we unfortunately could see nothing, as we had hit a snowstorm. My partner is an extremely cautious and patient driver, but the stress of seeing nothing but white and a vaguely visible line of asphalt through the windshield almost broke him.

Regardless, we arrived. The next morning, my sister told me her plan—she would take me to an incredible snowy forest and show my some really breathtaking views.

She’s an incredible liar, by the way. Not the sort of person who tells falsehoods, but rather the sort who tells you exactly what you want to hear in order to obscure something she knows you will not want to.

I forgot this particular thing about her, so I blindly and enthusiastically got into the car with my partner as he followed her and her family to the beginning of my worst nightmare.

I didn’t even realise what she had planned for me when we arrived at the bottom of a series of alpine gondolas. “Oh, those are crazy,” I said, and turned my face to the forested mountains instead. “Which way to the forest?”

My sister looked at me nervously. “We need to take a gondola there. But it’s short, I promise. We’ll be there before you even realise it.”

Panic set in, and I grabbed my partner’s hand. “Oh. You didn’t tell me…” I said to her, still forgetting how brilliantly manipulative she can be.

“You don’t have to go. But I really want you to see this.”

“You know I’m afraid of heights.”

She nodded. “That’s why I didn’t tell you.”

My partner, who by this point had assumed he knew everything about me, looked startled. “Tu as vertige? But you’re never afraid of anything…”

I nodded. “It’s really bad.”

I could tell he was wrestling with an ugly choice. He could either stay on the ground with me and be disappointed about not ascending, or he could try to convince and cajole me into going up with them despite how I obviously didn’t want to.

The thing is? I did want to go, more than anything. I just knew what would happen if I got into that gondola.

My two young nephews were with us. Neither of them have any fear of heights, but because they’re kids and understand fear better than us adults ever do, they both started trying to reassure me. “It’s scary but it’s okay,” said the youngest, and the eldest said “I was scared the first time too.”

When you’re a 44 year old man who’s lived on the streets, traveled to foreign places with just a few hundred dollars, a tent, and a backpack, and survived a few fist fights, an attempted mugging at gun-point, and all manners of political threats, a 10 year old and a 6 year old telling you to not be afraid is pretty wild.

So I got in the gondola, shaking before the doors even closed. I shut my eyes, grabbed a pole with a white-knuckled grip, and tried really hard not to act out the panic I was feeling.

Then it started, and the feeling got even worse.

Then it was over, and though I wanted to vomit it was all okay. We had arrived on a snow-covered cliff full of pines, and though I couldn’t see much from there it seemed probably worth the terror.

I sat down, smoked a cigarette. My sister approached, apologetically asking if I was okay.

“Yeah,” I said, realising at that moment that I would need to take that same gondola back down. “I think I can even survive doing that again.”

“Really?” she asked.

“Is there another way down?”

“Yes, but it takes two hours. You think you could do another one?”

I nodded, and she looked relieved but still a bit nervous.

“What about two more?”

I breathed in really hard. “Uh…why?”

She was silent a moment. “This isn’t where we’re going. There’s one or two more. But they are shorter.”

The full horror of what she’d done to me finally unveiled itself, and I looked around. This was just an interchange spot, not an actual destination. It was the equivalent of arriving at a station where you change trains and thinking that the platform was your ultimate goal.

“Oh fuck,” I said. “Okay.”

She had lied again. It was not one or two more, but three more. But that’s her. She knows me well, knew I wouldn’t have done any of this if I’d had all the truth. She also knew that I’d later thank her for lying to me, which I did.

The ultimate destination of the journey was to arrive at Piz Gloria, a pinnacle made famous (and renamed) by an old James Bond film. From the very top you can see visions only otherwise visible by plane, the entire world only snow-covered mountains and endless sky.

In the dizzying heights you see what only birds really ever see, and while I stood gripping tightly a railing, I watched ravens play in the cold winds and thought about how fear still holds me back from such raw existence.

The current theory on the fear of heights, which I think is a very accurate one, is that it is an inborn trait. Studies on human infants and the infants of other mammals (including mountain goats) have shown they all exhibit this fear, a panic when the ground seems to fall away from them.

Most of us lose this fear through the same means by which we lose other fears: we experience the consequences of the thing we feared. The fear of heights is actually the fear of falling, and when we fall we learn to stop being so afraid of it.

The reason someone with vertigo closes their eyes is because their vision is giving them the sense they are falling or about to fall. The extreme distance of things doesn’t match with the physical sense of being balanced (the floor beneath your feet in a gondola, the stone underfoot on a cliff side, the concrete upon which you are standing when looking over a bridge). So, suddenly all the information our senses give us seem untrustworthy.

A person who has fallen repeatedly as a child, however, has learned early on that there are moments the visual is unreliable and only the internal balance system of our inner ears and the body itself can be relied upon. The more you fall, the more you rely on the rest of your body to guide your balance, meaning eventually that you fall even less.

To get to such a point, however, you need to put yourself in positions where you might fall. I was an overly-cautious child. I rarely climbed trees because I knew I might fall and that might hurt. Though my parents were not particularly attentive, I understood from them that taking risks was a bad thing to do and therefore I avoided risks.

That obedience and caution is why I am now (still, but less so) terrified of heights.

It’s also why I rarely crash my bike, something I’ve been trying to change.

Today, riding home from some shopping, I took a particular curve in the path very fast. My bike tires are a bit deflated, and I knew that this means turning can sometimes go very wrong at high speeds. But I kept going, realising that I was very likely to lose control and go toppling right at the sharpest point of the curve.

And I did. It was a rather spectacular crash, and it hurt quite a bit, and then I started laughing.

It was the sort of thing I should have been experiencing all the time when I was younger. I should have fallen more, by which I mean I should have let myself risk falling more often. I didn’t really know what this sort of crash felt like, how much it would hurt, and how completely okay I’d be afterwards.

This sort of risk-taking is the same ethic I’ve been trying to apply to the rest of my life, too. The relationship I am in with the man I love is the riskiest relationship I’ve ever dared. I almost didn’t go on a second date with him, despite how utterly enchanting and beautiful the first had been, because I was terrified of falling in love with a man like him and how much that might stretch everything I knew about myself.

My recent writing is also this sort of risk-taking. For years I’ve stayed as far away from the edges of “acceptable” thought as possible, for fear of falling into territory in which people find my ideas anathema or I lose the support of a fickle community to which I’ve never really felt I belonged.

And there are many other places I’m learning to fall. You cannot climb higher, you cannot see the world from greater heights, until you know what falling teaches, and what comes after.

Happy Solstice.