We want to move up in life, to climb to heights, to soar above others. Even with our own selves we pursue self-improvement as a holy task, aided by self-help books and motivational gurus. The self is a project with quarterly targets. And falling is a sin. And yet the sweetest moments of our life are when exactly the opposite happens. When we fall. Nobody climbs in love. We fall in love, and we fall hopelessly. All the negative words that we fight so hard to avoid now take on a special quality. The old self, the one that kept accounts and maintained dignity, is briefly suspended. We are oddly cheerful and inordinately generous. We are not afraid to make a fool of ourselves,of being seen as idiots. And we develop a remarkable willingness to rearrange our lives around a text message. Falling in love is one of the few socially sanctioned occasions where the CEO can fall off their chair. Helplessness becomes oddly endearing. Lack of control becomes proof that our feelings are real, that they have a force that cannot be resisted. The intensity is self-validating, as is the capacity for foolishness. In love, we are allowed to be overwhelmed. We can admit to needs that, in every other department of life, we are trained to conceal. We can be obsessed without being diagnosed. We can say, "I couldn't help it," and be met with indulgence rather than contempt. Love converts loss of control into a sign of humanity. But if love is the grand fall, sleep is the everyday one. Every night, we rehearse surrender. We don't "do" sleep the way we do a task. We cannot will ourselves asleep by sheer effort, the way we can will ourselves through a presentation or a workout. If anything, the more one tries, the further away it goes. Sleep has always had this strange moral: effort can be counterproductive. The door opens only when you stop pushing it. To fall asleep is to allow one's inner sentry to stand down. It is to permit the world to continue without supervision. It is to let our thoughts loosen their grip on the day's storyline. We lie there, and we submit to the body, and at some stage it takes over. The body knows what is unknowable to the conscious mind. And then there are pursuits which rational minds could legitimately consider insane, that we volunteer for. Extreme sports like skydiving and bungee jumping areforaysinto an abyss of our own making. Here we do daft things like leaping off a plane or diving headlong, tied to a rubber rope, to feel an overpowering helplessness. We allow our bodies to be tossed around, to become rag dolls submitting to the whims of gravity. And we actually pay good money for this. Modernity cannot entirely trust falling, so it sells it back to us as an adventure. But you do not need to jump off a platform to see the