What saves this sentiment from being mere cheerleading is Mandela's hard-won understanding that *falling is inevitable*—not a personal failure, but a condition of living purposefully. The real glory, then, isn't in some mythical perfection, but in the unglamorous work of standing up again and again, which requires more courage than never risking the fall in the first place. Consider a parent who loses patience with their child, apologizes sincerely, and resolves to do better tomorrow: that cycle of falling and rising *is* the moral life, not an interruption of it. Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison, which is itself a kind of falling—and his power came not from his imprisonment never happening, but from what he chose to become in the rising.