In my late 20s, my world turned upside down in just 72 hours, my husband and I both lost our jobs at the same time in one disastrous week in May. Doug worked at a local construction(建筑）company, while I was a quality-control inspector for Jan Sport. We were both extremely hard workers, but we could not deal with a depressed economy (经济）.

Doug was laid off on Wednesday and, two short days later, I learned that my entire company had decided to move to Mexico to save money.

In the space of several days, we were without any means to support our family.

As you can imagine, I didn't react well to the news that both my husband and I were suddenly out of work without any earlier warning. Who would? I wanted to find a place to hide, but that wasn't a choice. Doug, understandably, felt unhappy. It was also one of the only three times in our entire marriage when I saw fear in his eyes.

Fortunately, our family had made a smart decision a few years earlier that saved us from the disaster. It had taken us two years, but we managed to save a $l,000 emergency fund(资金）．At the time, that $1,000 emergency fund was equal to about six weeks of bills.

Without that emergency fund to pay our rent, we would have probably been homeless. My family all lived in the Midwest-more than 2,000 miles away from us-so we didn't really have family support as a backup choice at the time. But having our emergency fund allowed us to pay bills for the next month. At the same time, we focused on job searches. Luckily, we both found work a few weeks later.

When I was a boy, our extended, immigrant family would sometimes gather at my aunt’s tiny house over the summer. Relatives from all over the country would come in to visit. The adults would crowd together in the living room to talk and catch up on each other' s lives. And the kids would be sent out into the front yard to play when dinner was slowly cooked for all of us.

Those were the days before video games, smart phones, and motorized toys, so we often ended up playing an old game. I remember one of those moments especially. As I was the youngest and smallest of all the kids there, I got caught first and couldn't catch anyone else. My brothers and cousins were all too fast for me, and I grew more and more frustrated. I finally fell my face first into the dirt. I got up with tears forming in my eyes. Then I saw one of my female cousins Susan standing there. She started to run but was going much slower than before. I easily caught up and seized her. Then she turned to me, smiled, and said, "I'm it! You'd better run!" I ran off laughing with glee while she turned and started to chase others.

Now I see how her act of kindness that day saved me from sadness and returned me to joy. It didn't matter that we hardly ever saw each other. I know we are family and she loves me.

In her wonderful book: Box of Butterflies, Roma Downey writes, "We are all one, we all belong to each other, and we are one big. beautiful family." Perhaps it is time that we all started to treat each other that way. Perhaps it is time that we shared our love, our kindness, our laughter, and our joy with everyone without fear. Perhaps it is time to finally and forever bring this world together in one big family reunion.

If our kids don’t fall, they don’t learn to get up. I still remember the day in high school that my mom forgot to pick me up from school. I’m the oldest of four children, and no doubt she’d had a long day with the other kids and she forgot it. After waiting at school for an hour, I walked the three miles home, and when I got to my house, I shut our front door with anger, stormed into the kitchen and screamed in my mom’s face that she’d forgotten me.

Later that night, my dad told me I no longer had a ride to school the next day. I thought my mom would still take me, but when the morning came, she refused. It was midterm, and as a top student ready to start college applications, being late wasn’t proper. In my mind, missing these tests means the end of my academic career. I begged my mom. But she held her ground, and that day, I walked to school. And I missed my tests.

My mom didn’t rescue(营救) me from failure. She let me suffer from it. She let me figure it out. She let me learn. Now, as a mom myself, I’ve realized that I want my kids to experience failure because failure is how we grow, learn and think outside of ourselves. It’s how we self-educate to learn what’s right and respectable, and what’s not. It’s how we become responsible and enthusiastic.

Falling down makes us better, because we learn how to get up.