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Today's
Meditation:
It took me a
long while until I reached a point at which I was able to
laugh at many of my failures. I grew up always
worried about what other people thought of me, and since I
was very hard on myself, I just knew that other people
were judging me harshly, also, and that they thought less
of me when they witnessed my failures. So failure
was always something terrible for me, something that
caused me a great deal of stress and tension.
Nowadays,
I celebrate my failures because they help me to learn
things that don't work. I can celebrate them because
I know that in the bigger picture of life, most of what I
do has so little significance that it really doesn't
matter if I fail at a few things. There are, of
course, things that I work very hard at in order not to
fail-- my students don't deserve to have me fail at helping
them to learn, and I don't want to fail to make payments
on time or fail to stop at a red light when I'm
driving. Those aren't failures that we can laugh
over.
And
sometimes laughter isn't called for, either-- but that
doesn't keep us from accepting our failures for what they
are and moving on with our lives. "Okay, that
didn't work" is a healthy way of looking at failure,
as opposed to letting it bring us down and make us feel
awful about ourselves and about life in general.
If
I'm running a race and I come in fourth place, I didn't
"fail" to win-- I came in fourth place, and
that's pretty good. If I'm just learning a language,
I don't "fail" if I'm not able to translate a
conversation-- but I certainly can give it my best effort,
and be satisfied with that. Part of being able to
laugh at our failures is realizing that the fact that we
weren't able to do something doesn't necessarily mean that
we've failed, and that life goes on even if we aren't able
to do everything that we attempt.
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