Full of wisdom! Thank you, John, for this interesting poem and for sharing your insights about the Chinese proverb. You did it so beautifully and conveyed a strong message of what we are experiencing on Medium. I agree that our missteps and the consequent stumbles are not mere setbacks but are pivotal to the learning curve of life. Each fall, each failure, carries with it the weight of a lesson learned, a pattern recognized, or a risk better understood. Cheers! 🥂