Stumbling Can Be Lovely

Devin Kelly | Longreads | March 7, 2024 | 29 minutes (5,259 words)

Over the past year, I have fallen countless times. I have fallen at high speeds and low. I have fallen turning a corner on Randall’s Island at 20 miles an hour, and I have fallen at the perilous speed of nearly zero miles an hour. I have fallen on asphalt, grass, astroturf, and gravel. I have fallen, in no particular order, and in many various quantities, on my elbows, my knees, my thighs, my head, my shoulders, my wrists, and my hands. I have fallen trying to speed up, and I have fallen trying to slow down. I have fallen going uphill and down. I have fallen while going so slow that I could have just stepped off the bike. I have fallen in front of people. I have fallen in front of so many people. I have fallen in front of a single person so engrossed by their phone that they did not see me falling. I have fallen in front of a family of tourists in Central Park, and then I have gotten up and fallen again. I have fallen, while white-knuckling the brakes, gently and sideways into a fence while a herd of children clutching a communal leash waddled past me. I have fallen in front of a mother and her baby. I have also fallen in front of no one, in the sheer absence of a soul, alone in a parking lot in the early morning, after having bumped into a traffic cone. I have, in the process of falling, said the same chorus of things, all at the same resigned volume, never too loud. I have fallen and said oop. I have fallen and said ah, shit. I have fallen and apologized. 

Before the first of these many falls, there is a day where you might find yourself—if you are in Central Park one morning in early July—watching me, a 32-year-old man, learning for the first time how to ride a bike. If you can see me, you must also see my friend Hal riding right beside, a city kid his whole life, someone who can swerve a fixie through traffic, someone who can ride a bike with only one of his four limbs touching any part of the thing. We are in a grassy field off of 72nd Street—harder to get going on, harder to stay going on, but softer on the body when the body inevitably goes down. The body goes down a lot. It is hot. There is someone picnicking in the shade. A mother and her child under another tree. Countless people walking endless circles on the pedestrian path around the field. 

The hardest part is the launch, Hal says.

He is right.

I put one foot on the pedal, try to push off, to launch—and I fall.

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It is a somewhat-scientific, often-disputed fact that learning gets harder as you age. The brain becomes less plastic at a certain point, yes, but really what I’d argue is that adulthood sets in, and with it comes the monotonous mundanity of accepting the person you have taken into adulthood: yourself. No longer does this world afford you, an adult who is supposed to have their shit together, the strangely wide and luminous space allotted to children, that whimsical and imaginative place where scrapes can be kissed away and where the letter A resembles aardvarks and where what is broken can be fixed, even forgotten. As a child, you fly down the hill that once sent you crashing. The number for poison control is on the fridge. You don’t grow up until you have to. And then there you are: grown up, your nature rooted, wide trunk in a storm. Try to move. You can’t. You grow from the thing you are. And always, you remain yourself. Ah, fuck.

People often link adulthood and maturity, adulthood and strength, adulthood and something resembling confidence. Personally, I have nearly always associated adulthood with fear and shame. I have learned, as an adult, less about what I am capable of and more about the opposite. I have learned about my capacity for cruelty and the sense of safety I find in shame, how I have sometimes used the shame I feel about myself to excuse myself for what I’ve done wrong, little self-deprecating jokester I can be, little not worth it kind of boy. There; I’m doing it again. I have learned how hard it is to commit to something, anything, other than the usual—the way I let my resentments build without speaking about them, the way I hide, over and over again, the parts of me I hate the most, even though I have said, over and over again, that I will allow someone to try to understand them. 

Over time, as a result of this learning that hasn’t always translated into change, I have found a kind of grace that I have extended to people from afar, people who I have heard have gotten sober, people who have logged off every account, people who have leaned into an imaginative practice of wondering how this life could be different, and then who have stopped leaning, and have taken that step. Through all of this thinking and realizing and learning, I have not known how to ride a bike. 

 I’ve never done that, you know? I’ve never driven home.

“Things can change over time,” Ali Smith writes in her novel Spring, “what looks fixed and pinned and closed in a life can change and open and what’s unthinkable and impossible in one time will be easily possible in another.” I think, too, that what makes learning harder over time is a refusal to believe in this possibility that Smith articulates. I encounter that refusal often in this world. It lives in politics; it lives in the hard and well-intentioned work of caretaking and educating. It lives in places where stress is high and the imagination is discredited as whimsy, mere child’s play. A waste of time, someone might say in response to the imagination that brings about a more radical politics, a notion of peace where there once was violence, as if what is made possible by the imagination is not worthy of the more serious things afoot, those things some poor dreamer—someone willing to learn—just wouldn’t understand.

“To err is baby elephant, tripping over her trunk,” Amy Leach writes in The Everybody Ensemble. It’s a beautiful image; it reaches back to childhood and brings it into the present. It unsets me in my ways, breaking me free from the idea that stumbling can’t be lovely—adorable, even, maybe not even something worthy of shame. It grants me forgiveness for being myself, baby elephant I sometimes am. For a long time I have been set in my ways. I have walked where I have needed to go; if I have needed to get there faster, I have run; if I have needed to get farther, I have asked someone to drive me. 

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Over the past month, too, if you have been out for a walk in New York City, you may have seen me driving a tiny red car. On the car it says STUDENT. On the car it says DRIVING SCHOOL. In the car there is a man next to me with his own rearview mirror and his own brake. While in that car, I have confused my left blinker for my right; I have pretended to know how to adjust my mirrors instead of asking for advice. I have slammed on the brakes, and I have rolled through a stop sign. I have driven far too slowly; I have stopped at a yellow light and waited for it to turn red. I have done this so often that my instructor has had to remind me that yellow doesn’t necessarily mean stop. It’s okay, he has said, to go. And I have gone. I have gone too fast. I have run a red light. I have been given thumbs up and thumbs down; I have been commented on by strangers. I have had my picture taken, once, while parallel parking. Nice job, the man taking the picture said. I did not know this man. Thank you, I said. I have felt embarrassed. I have felt seen, unseen, visible, invisible, alone. I have grown down and grown up all over again.

Prior to my first driving lesson, I was so nervous that I peed three times in the 30 minutes before I had to walk out my apartment’s door. I have never known anyone, a friend said, who has learned how to drive in New York City. Usually, he said, people learn—and then he gestured with his hands to indicate some place other than this, where there did not exist such a relentless hum of noise and metal—somewhere else.

I have had six learner’s permits over the course of my life. I have renewed them in the way that people casually renew gym memberships and subscriptions. I have just needed the identification. The older I have gotten, the more scared I have grown of driving, unnatural thing it seems. And yet, most of my fondest memories from childhood have been as a passenger in the backseat of a car, my father driving the long road to his mother’s house in Rochester—the Wendy’s hamburgers and French fries dipped into a communal cup of ketchup we kept (father, brother, and me) in the cup holder of the car, the gas station sodas and Necco wafers, the radio going in and out across state lines, trying to find the Yankees game, any game, switching to CDs when it got too late—The Band’s Music from Big Pink all year round, The Chieftains’ Christmas album in the winter. I’m a child of that road, but I am older now, and I don’t know how to drive that road.

And so I told myself, at age 32, that this would be the year when I learned how to ride a bike and how to drive a car. This is something I have told myself before, but haven’t followed through on. I’ve said this is because of busyness, because of time. I’ve positioned myself against the car as an object of capitalism. I have always been able to run as far as a bike could take me. I have run 13 miles at once. Twenty-six miles. Fifty miles. One hundred. Even more. I have run for days on end. I once ran, with my friends, across the entire state of New York. Many cars  passed us, sometimes quite closely. We didn’t like that, and we also didn’t need the ride. But the truth is that I have nearly always been scared. I have been scared of learning, and I have been humbled by the absence of ability—the countless miles my wife has driven me, the one time, hungover, I slept in the passenger seat while she drove through the morning. 

We pretend at certainty all of the time, even in the stumbling that life almost always is.

And yet, I have had these images in my head. I am pushing hundreds of watts up a mountain climb, my jersey open and my chest heaving and my heart beating out of my chest and my mouth rich with the taste of pennies. I am ripping 30 miles an hour along a flat road in the middle of anywhere, me and the yellow line and the horizon a beautiful thing that can take its sweet time coming my way as I push the pedals and move toward it. I am driving, window down, left arm in the breeze, Springsteen singing out the speakers. I am driving and someone I love trusts me enough to fall asleep in the passenger seat. I am older and I don’t have an answer to are we there yet. I am a father and I poke my child’s knee to keep them up with me. I am driving home. I’ve never done that, you know? I’ve never driven home.

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The hardest part is the launch, Hal says. He says it again and again. 

I keep launching and it keeps not working. On the park’s road to my right, a dozen people ease their merry way through the summer afternoon on Citi Bikes. I am sweating and covered in grass stains and mud.

We are in a field in one of the most famous public parks in the world, and I am trying to forget the people. There are so many people. I straddle the bike. I put my right foot on the right pedal. I push off and the bike moves, and then I get scared. I can’t find the left pedal with my left foot. Or I can find the left pedal with my left foot, but I don’t know what to do. It just sits there, foot atop the pedal, and doesn’t push. And then I fall over. I throw the bike away as I do. I find the ground. I expect it, green and damp with that humid mud of summer. I get up. I am sweating, dirty; I feel a little fat. I don’t know. It’s just a thought that comes to my head. With all these people around. With all of them. Yeah. I feel a little fat. 

Once you get it, you get it, Hal says. 

And I try again. Right foot push off. Bike in motion. I am not used to the motion. It feels wrong, so wrong, to be moving almost without my body.

The bike wants to go forward, Hal says.

I don’t know if I want to go forward, I say. I smile because I feel a little bit like crying.

Right foot pushing; bike moving. Left foot on the pedal. Left foot not pushing. I fall down. I lay there a little longer than the last time, or the time before, or the time before. Hal is patient; Hal is kind. It is not Hal that worries me. It is all the people. I wish I had on knee and elbow pads in an abandoned parking lot 40 miles away from the nearest highway. I wish I had a private road, a little field to myself. I wish I had the cover of darkness. I count them, all the people. Three in the field, plus the two of us. Over 20 circulating the perimeter at the moment. Millions more around. Every second, a new person in my field of vision, which is not a private field, but is instead a public park. And I think: it’s not privacy I want. It’s not the solitude of the parking lot, the blank space of the empty field. I just want to be young. I want it to feel acceptable that I am here, learning how to be a kid at the age of 32.

There is something about learning, about admitting I don’t know, that brings you back into that space of childhood, with its mix of excitement and possibility and fear and shame. There is something about being a beginner again. On Reddit, where I lurk in the days after my lesson for tips about how to start riding a bike, someone says the best time to plant a tree is years ago; the second best time is now. I want to scoff at this random commenter, but I can’t. It’s 10 at night and I’m sitting by the window with my computer on my lap, and I almost want to cry. We pretend at certainty all of the time, even in the stumbling that life almost always is. I have always felt a little stunted for not knowing how to do two seemingly simple things. I have always felt a little off. I want to know how to do things, but I also know how long such learning takes. Older, I know that falling is part of learning. I’m scared of falling. I’m scared of trying and not succeeding. I’m scared of it all.

It is hard, I think, to learn as an adult. This is not some profound statement. It just is. But it is not hard because of the fact of it; it is hard because learning anything means learning again how to learn. It’s not that riding a bike is hard; it’s that learning is hard. Learning requires something of us. It requires our patience, yes. It requires, also, our humility. When you are older, falling means more than pain. It means failure, and shame. It means having, sometimes sadly, the self and contextual awareness to see yourself outside of yourself, so that when you fall, you don’t really fall once. When you fall, you perform the act of falling, and then you also—at the very same time—see yourself falling. You fall twice, three times even. You fall infinitely, extending the act of your fall into the eyes of whoever you think—or care—will notice. You fall forever multiplied by a billion. Because part of growing up means growing up with shame. It means growing up with doubt. You remember all you do not know, that one time you blurted out that awful joke, that time you sort of shat yourself in the hospital bed, and had to call the nurse for a new gown. You scold yourself for all of it; you think more of the mess you’ve made than anything else. You think it can be seen by anyone’s eyes. You are a video on loop, falling and falling again. The world makes you feel ashamed enough each day; why make yourself feel it by trying to learn?

It is only when Hal turns away that I get it right. I push off with my right foot. I am moving. I find the pedal with my left foot. I push it. The bike keeps moving. It feels like magic, briefly. Breeze in my face, the world at a different speed. This strange mechanism of the bike below me, this gentle motion never felt. And the unnameable beauty of not knowing how any of it works. The pedals are moving. I am moving. I am a little scared. I am rolling past the mother and her baby. I shout to Hal. I shout ahhh. I shout woohoo. I shout oh god, oh no. I am living somewhere on the precipice of joy. I am a grown man riding a bicycle for the first time. Hal chases after me on his bike, one leg dangling off of it, as if his ankle is pumping a fist in the air in the same way his arm is. He is smiling through his words. I realize I don’t know how to turn, and I fall. 

After a few more failed attempts to launch, it happens again. I am riding. This time I turn left around the field. I duck my head under the branch of a tree. And then I give up control in the middle of a ditch and sideways-somersault over the bike and into the mud. But then: back straddling the bike. A failed attempt to launch. Another. And finally I am riding again. Laps around the field. Hal behind me, laughing as he takes a video. 

He just learned how to ride a bike, he says to the mother, and to her baby, before I fall right in front of them.

For a few brief and beautiful moments in that field, I am a boy again. Small, but massive in spirit and possibility. Moving on the bike, I am a child who has just figured out how to stack the nonsense blocks of life into something tall with shape and meaning, and I want to show the world.  Look at this thing I made, I want to say. I smile as I bike past the mother without falling, past the person picnicking on the grass. I am gleeful, even a little reckless. It is a new feeling, utterly new. I want to bottle it up. I want to hold onto it forever. 

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After that day, I would wake up very early in the morning and walk the bike Hal leant me over to Randall’s Island, where almost no one was. The first morning I did this, I had to learn again how to launch a bike. I stood on a gravel path, the massive apartment industrial complex of Manhattan jutting up against the water’s edge on the other side of the river, thinking it would come easy, and realizing quickly that it wouldn’t. I fell; I poured sweat. There was sweat coming out of my butt and it stained my shorts. I was listening to Phoebe Bridgers, which both helped and did not help. I wanted to cry again. I grew scared of my anxiety. People walked by, and I could feel them looking, even if they never looked at all. But then it happened. I got the launch right. And motion happened. And I was a boy again, coasting along with the river to my left. 

Learning, I think, makes you forget, and this forgetting is a beautiful thing. You forget what you were. You forget how you defined yourself, and how you defined the world. You forget that you once told yourself that there was no such thing as possibility, that you were who you were. You forget, for a small and gorgeous instant, your shame. It comes back, I know. But for a moment it is gone, and you are who you were once, before pain and shame and fear and loss, and you are who you are now—holding all of that but holding something new, the fact of you being merely possible, the fact of you flying, the fact of wind in your hair, the fact of life being what it is, life, which means birth, which means you are not stuck, which means yes, you can learn, which means no, it is not always exactly how you think it is, which means where is the fun in that, which means that I love you, little body you call your own, little trying thing, little learning thing. I’m proud.

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And I wish it ended there. Though I don’t wish that. I don’t wish endings anymore; they don’t happen until they do. I think of a moment from Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour, when she writes: “Isn’t it funny how we all die at the same time? Always at the end of our lives. Why worry?” In between that final ending and wherever you are now is some mix of what is certain and what is not, though, I imagine, what is certain is the uncertainty of it all.

And so no, it did not end with the wind in my hair along the river’s edge. It did not end with me, a few weeks later, failing my driving test, my hands shaking at the wheel as if I had just become, once again, 15 years old and terrified of authority. It did not end with me, even later, scheduling an MRI for my left knee—healthy for my whole life—because I was nursing some pain that had kept me from running. And it didn’t end with the tinny headphone music I listened to in that MRI tube, or with me, the next week, sitting in my old surgeon’s office as he told me I would need a cartilage transplant in that once-healthy knee. No, it didn’t end. It doesn’t.

What is the word for that? For the wild surprise of life we make possible by learning, each day, how to live?

Years ago, I sat in that same office, where I learned that I would have to undergo surgery to transplant cartilage into my right knee. After six weeks in a straight leg brace, I had to learn again, briefly, how to walk. And then, months later, how to run. 

It’s funny, what we learn and then learn again. 

It’s as if we are so full of not knowing. 

It’s almost as if this not-knowing makes up our whole life.

Back then, when I learned that I could run again, I stopped breaking into a run the moment I left my apartment. I walked a few minutes to the park, thinking of the run to come, savoring its possibility. I learned gratitude as if it were a math formula. I understood what it meant, its varied applications. I learned that I had to devote time to it, and so I did. I devoted time to being grateful.

When I learned that I would have to face, possibly, that same surgery again, but in my other knee, I did again what I did years before. I deleted my Instagram app from my phone, peppered as it was with runners and influencers talking about running. I nodded and tried to appear supportive when any of my friends talked about running—a race they were training for, a class they took, a single stride they strode, a footfall landed. Inside, I harbored a private grief. I felt angry, sad. I missed, already, all I knew I would miss: that first autumn morning when it was cool enough to wear long sleeves, when sweat felt so good and right in its beautiful contrast against the warm body moving through the brisk air, when the light, so sharp and precise, cut through the cold dark, gorgeous miracle it could be, gorgeous miracle it always is.

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And it could end there, right? It could end right there with grief. But it doesn’t. Because life persists, still. And, as this all happens—and it still is happening—I wake up each morning in the darkness with a little red road bike that Hal gave me. I have named it Clifford. Big red dog, timid and adorable, peeking between the buildings. Too scared to ride through the city streets to the park, I walk it most of the way, and then get on. It’s dark for the first lap of the park, and my headlight shines a small and golden thing for me to follow with my eyes. I don’t feel as sure as I do when I run. Running, for me, is more than just a learned thing; it is a part of myself. It’s not some simple activity, not some fitness goal; it is, and always will be, an expression of my personhood. I will always be that kid cradling a Walkman to keep it from skipping, running the two-mile loop of my neighborhood to get out of my own head. But now, in the park, on this unfamiliar machine, I am learning, once again, how to become more of who I am. 

It is hard to imagine—sometimes, even often—a life different than the one you live, even if such difference feels slight: the breeze in your hair at 25 miles an hour, coasting on a bike down the backside of Harlem Hill. I type that sentence, right now, about two hours after the fact of that feeling, a feeling I didn’t know was possible for me to feel until not long ago. The wind was in my face. I was a little bit scared and a little bit beautiful, both things that I have felt, but never in that context, never once. And now: that new possibility. 

So, I am here to tell you that it works sometimes, this learning thing, this unending thing we call a life until it ends. Yes, let me tell you; it does. Over the past few months, on so many mornings, I have turned into Engineers’ Gate in Central Park. On those mornings, it is before dawn, maybe 5:30. There is hardly anyone there. And I shift down the gears until I feel what I want to feel, which is not quite pain yet, not quite suffering, but something approaching it: my happy place, my little canvas of expression. And I pedal. And I breathe. I am who I am: injured thing, moving thing, learning thing. And for an instant, I feel beautiful. I feel reminded that I learned this new part of myself, that I didn’t know it before, that I am capable of such change. If you asked me months or years ago, I would have come up with some joke, something self-deprecating, something rooted in the self to tell you why I didn’t feel capable of expanding myself. I would have said I don’t know how to ride a bike; I never learned.

But then there was the learning, by which I mean that there were the falls, and the little embarrassments. There was the friend, texting me always, maybe today—I could teach you. There were the uncertainties, and the private nature of it all, the way no one watching me fall maybe knew at all that I was in the process of something—as we all, often, so often, are. There was me, pretending at certainty in so much of my life, knowing that I needed to shoulder that in favor of something a little more kinder, which is to say uncertainty, which is to say grace. And then there was the sunlight moving over the river to my left. And then there was the wind in my hair. And then there was the other morning, flying around the park in the soft light of just-after-dawn, when I saw Hal with his cycling team, just after a ride. 

Hal, I yelled. 

I was going too fast to hear his response.

Arriving home, I saw a text from him: Your smile as you flew past: it made my day. 

Just yesterday, it was Hal who texted me his final words of advice prior to a ride I attempted in Central Park to cap off my year of riding. I wanted to ride 100 miles—just over 16 loops of the park. I started in darkness, just before four in the morning, and for the first two loops of the park, I didn’t see a single soul other than a few raccoons scampering across the road. I was—or I felt like—a boy and his lamp and his bike, riding in the middle of the city, lonely and in love. And I was, most of all, grateful. Wildly so. The winter wind was stinging my nose and the city was waking up and my bike was whirring and I was clicking down through the gears and I was getting to know myself a little more by the second, which is to say that I was learning. If you told me long ago that this would be me, one December morning, I wouldn’t have believed it. But it was. And it is. What is the word for that? For the wild surprise of life we make possible by learning, each day, how to live?

There is still so much I don’t know. I don’t know when I will need surgery, though I know that I will, and I know that, when I have it, I will be, once again, a grown man with a cane moving slowly through the world as the world moves fast around me. I don’t know how to ride a bike like Hal, with the calm ease of someone who feels a thing to be so much a part of himself. But I do know that I can learn. I know that much. That I am a learning thing, and that what I learn is both in my control and out of it. I think of all I have learned how to cope with that I haven’t wanted to. And you, too. Right? All you have learned how to cope with that you haven’t wanted to. But you’ve learned, haven’t you? You’ve learned how to cope. Which also means you’ve learned—and are still learning—how to live.

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Devin Kelly is the author of In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen (published by Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the co-host of the Dead Rabbits Reading Series. He is the winner of a Best of the Net Prize, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian, LitHub, Catapult, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and more. He lives and teaches high school in New York City.

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Editor: Krista Stevens

Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands