We all make mistakes. How do/can we recover?

For the longest time, I’ve been drawn to a clip from Christopher Nolan’s Batman film that for some reason I always come back to. You can say that it almost matches my obsession for John W Gardner’s essay on renewal.

“Why do we fall?”

“So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

There is a scene at the beginning of the film when the young Bruce Wayne falls down a hole, and his father manages to find him and rescue him. The boy feels naturally shaken, and while being carry back into the house his father asks in a comforting manner, “Why do we fall?” And he gives young Bruce the answer, “So we can learn to pick ourselves up.” Alfred is nearby watching this exchange occur.

This is repeated near the end of the movie after his father is long dead and gone, and when the adult Bruce Wayne has done something catastrophic to his family’s legacy. At which point he is reminded by Alfred what his father told him when he was just a boy.

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Or as the late, great Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) once said,

“Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”

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