With every step you take, you teach yourself how to walk in the world.

From Alfred’s journal

The Petersons' boy was out on the sidewalk all afternoon learning to ride his bicycle, and I watched from the gutter above their porch because the light was good and I had nothing better. He fell four times. What I noticed on the fifth go was that his shoulders had stopped arguing with the handlebars; nobody told him to do that, the falling told him. For years I thought practice was a thing you did before the real attempt, the way I used to believe a fledgling worked out flying and then flew. With every step you take, you teach yourself how to walk in the world, and the lesson and the walking are the same event, which is why you cannot skip ahead. He went in when his mother called and he was still wobbling, just wobbling in a different way than at noon.