Ah gravity, and our excruciating fear of falling onto it. We try so hard our whole lives not to fall, because… one… it hurts and two, getting back up is difficult and requires an elusive amount of hard work… Yuck.

Call it what you want, the fall, the defeat, the decomposition, the sinking, the letting go, and the embarrassment of it all. Often not openly glorified or as glamours as ‘the rise’. Of course, who wants the bad stuff anyways? We are stacking one card over the other and expecting it never to be blown down by some godforsaken gust of wind.

In the heartbeat’s sinusoidal wave, the going down of the curve is just as important as it’s going up. A flatline means death. There is no up without a down.

Icarus’s fall is probably the most famous fall of them all. (after Humpty Dumpty of course.) Icarus fell because he didn’t listen to his father’s caution of not flying too close to the sun. Maybe the lesson here is to not give your son wings made partially of wax… Are you telling me that Daedalus, Icarus’s father, could make a labyrinth that could trap a monstrous Minotaur but couldn’t make his son wings made of some other material? Common, give me a break.

Dwelling into historical origins of nursery rhymes and fairy tales which are usually grim. Jack and Jill fell down because well, hills present a perfect parabolic curve that falls can easily happen from. It’s a pretty basic Newtonian law. Although one of the folklores here is that this was inspired by a story about a couple from a village called Kilmersdon in Somerset, UK dating back to the 1700s. Where Jack goes up a hill, has an accident and dies, soon after which his pregnant wife Jill also dies of heartbreak. A connotation of this could be that one always falls in love. You don’t rise in love.

 You fall into an abyss; no one ever climbs up into a void. Most fall stories highlight the fragility of human nature and how happiness and success should be rationed, too much of which is no good and that ‘flying’ too high will only make the fall more painful.

The fall of a kingdom leads to the dereliction of a culture or state. Falls, are, 100% of the time, related to the disintegration of a thing, to failure, incompetence or with not being able to keep up a standard no one agreed upon.

Falling leads to breaking and that is usually not beautiful in a conventional way.

The rain, however, is probably one of the most sublime kinds of falling there is. Then again, it can be either snowflakes or hailstorms. Water has this wonderful quality of falling from one surface to another. The Niagara or the Victoria Falls owe their magnanimity to the plain and simple idea of a liquid falling from a high surface to a lower one… in the grandest scale possible. That in and of itself, is awesome.

Water is not demeaned for falling. It is expected to. Hydrogen molecules form the clouds and fall down when it gets too heavy. A pseudo problem occurs when the top is given a place of reverence, and falling from grace is looked down upon.

The shift in the vantage point occurs when we realize that falling is necessary for the rise. The gravity that holds us up on the top of a building is the same gravity that pulls us down. Falling is a precursor to flying. Sort of…We have to learn to trust the fall and go further down than ever before. Maybe then…only then… falling can be just as fortunate as the rise.