Everyone Should Fall Down The Stairs At Least Once In Their Lifetime

A misstep, the edge of the shoe placed incorrectly, a centre of gravity miscalculated by the subconsciousness… Well, it happens to the best of us.

Sometimes, nothing can be done. It is just bad luck. Is it, really? Scrolling through TikTok (or Facebook, if talking about the elderly), trying to open a pack of Haribo, taking a quick sky-selfie… All absolutely key activities in life — until you do them on the stairs and then blame bad luck.

Anyway, it happened. Surprise and terror blend into a single, undefined emotion. Time slows down. Maybe a short F-word escapes the mouth. Maybe nothing does, because the brain is busy screening a movie of the past few years’ highlights: the funeral of a beloved hamster, a first kiss, that fantastic bacon toast from last Thursday.

The actual act of falling is simple and quick. We don’t know exactly how it was before 1687, but since Newton formulated the law of gravity, it seems that it’s exactly the gravity that pulls your body straight down, accelerating at 9.81 m/s2.

Straight down? Well, falling down the stairs differs from, say, dropping out of a hot-air balloon because on that vertical path downward, there are… stairs. This might be where the forward-roll lessons from first-grade PE could come in handy. Barely remembered but hopefully retained in muscle memory.

Amateurs stretch out their arms to break their fall and end up breaking their wrists. Pros curl up, pull their limbs in, and allow themselves to roll, just like in those old-school somersaults. Maybe physical education classes are not so pointless after all? How can we carry out such a complex inner dialogue in the brief time it takes to cover those few meters of vertical distance?

Finally, it’s over. If you still have a bit of luck left, you’ll emerge with just a few bruises and scrapes. It’s the pride that usually suffers most, especially if you have flopped in front of an audience. It's amazing how many familiar faces show up immediately when something embarrassing happens.

You stand up. Dust yourself off. Wipe the blood from the chin. Life goes on.

You’ve learned your lesson. You’ll never forget the three-point support rule. You will treat all other safety procedures with the humble respect they deserve. Welcome to the club.

It was a worthy experience. Let it never happen again.

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Stay safe in this new year of 2025.

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