Failure

If only life were so simple as to always ascend upwards and to be relentless in its constant reaffirmation of happiness for all - but life is rarely like this. For the bulk of us, it seems that life is one harsh defeat after another. As my sister always says: life is like a business cycle, going up and down periodically but in the long run, hopefully slowly rising towards happiness. A quote my good friend likes is by Confucius: “our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in getting up every time we do”. How we deal with failure is a large part of life and i believe i can safely say that i do not deal well at all.

Failing is inevitable for most people especially for anyone who strives to be their best, in whatever field they choose. One can never be the best at everything they do – it’s just not possible, not matter how hard one might try, so to accept defeat and failure graciously says a lot about one’s character. Ever since i began playing competitive sports, the concept of sportsmanship was emphasised to me greatly. It was all about abiding by the rules and winning gloriously or losing with conviction. Life should be treated the same – it is always competitive whether this is in the academic, social or work world, there is always a bit of competition; most would blame the capitalist system for this. You can never expect to excel in all these fields: you can’t be first for every subject you do, you can’t always be the most popular person, you can’t always get your dream job. What you can do is every time you do fail in your attempts to become one of these, is to get up with grace, with a smile on your face, and fight again another day.

While these words are easy to say, these actions are hard to carry through, but we must learn to gain from our failures. Personally i cope terribly with failure; i begin to question my entire existence once again, with the whole fabric of the cosmos taken into question. Just recently in another one of my what seems like weekly post-failure epiphanies, i have decided to carry out some actions that i hope will make my failure a learning experience and that, i feel, is what should happen for all defeats. Not to dwell, or blame someone or something else, but to accept failure and to learn from it. Character development (which sounds like a writer’s conference) is the one motif my friend stressed throughout summer, and especially as a young adult, the stereotype remains very true – we are all out to find out who we really are, who we are comfortable being and what boundaries of the social norm should remain intact and every defeat we have - especially this time of our lives - should be taken simply as character development not as character defeat.

Pledging to my fellow readers that i will stop taking failure so badly so bye.