For most of the people facing failures in their lives is quite a common thing. There are very few people who can claim– he hasn’t seen failure in his life. But, what is the definition of failure? In our lives we have some expectations, desires, and goals and we expect these to materialize in some point. But, whatever are the reasons, for many of us it just doesn’t happen. Mr. X tried to clear civil service examination four times and ended up getting a job of primary school teacher. Mr. Y loved a girl from his neighborhood; he dreamed of spending his whole life with her, but he couldn’t win her heart. There are so many incidents of failures in our every day life! Some of these incidents sometimes leave us shattered; we don’t know what to do in that lowly moments, we just wait for time to heal or make it less intense.
How can we sail through failures
Not getting the desired result and thereafter being absolutely fine is almost impossible for many of us. Whenever failures occur in our lives, we start to doubt ourselves; we feel worthless and depressed. Any sort of consolation from others seems to be fallen in deaf’s ears. Luckily the passing time generally tends to lessen that grave feelings, otherwise we may lose our sanity if we continue to delve in that low pit. However, we can’t let alone time to heal us; we should find a workable solution so that failures can’t take a toll on us.
Acceptance: We can’t accept failures easily, because, somewhere deep inside we feel that we are something special, something special than others. Everyone in some point of time, if not all the time, feels that way. I won’t say it is right or wrong, but, such ingrained human behavior hinders us to accept failures. Rather in the time of failure, our hearts would shout – how this can happen to me, I don’t deserve this; considering my ability and nature (and so on) I deserve better! Somehow, if we get rid of such feeling to a some extent, it will be easy for us to accept failures. In this context one particular line of a short story that I read earlier comes to my mind. In that story, one character tells another character– sometimes you should look at the sky, your heart would be opened up; you will find how tiny and insignificant you are in comparison to that vastness! So, sometimes we should not take ourselves too seriously; in an incredibly vast universe where our physical presences are all but negligible, our stories of success or failure have little significance here. Accepting that fact we need to move on as soon as possible.
Failure as a learning process: While I was in college, as a student of science we had to do salt analysis in our chemistry practical classes. To detect the right components ( cation or anion) a student has to perform a series of tests, but lastly only one or two test would successfully provide the desired results. Our professor would tell us that irrespective of the results, we had to note down all the tests we conducted; we should not record just the tests which indicated the right components. Why? The professor would say- the negative tests are equally important as the tests which provide the desired result, because, only the recording of negative tests would give the complete picture of the whole process of experiment. The failures we encounter indicate the path towards our goal; it shows us what way we shouldn’t or needn’t do, or in other words it pave the way for our success.
Is it possible to accept failure
To tell someone to accept his or her failure is sometimes seemed to be quite superficial. A person who is completely broken in grief for something unpleasant that very recently happened to him or her, and giving a lecture on accepting failure would be a hollow thing to do. Here, important question is – are we capable of accepting failure? Perhaps most of us are not well endowed in this regard. We generally cling to our emotions, thoughts, and a negative feeling arising out of these is even harder to get rid of. So, what should we do?
I think – first thing we can do is changing our attitude towards life. Perhaps we need to be more process oriented, rather than being goal oriented. There is a very well known saying of Lord Krishna in popular Indian scripture the Bhagavad Gita. It says- we should focus only on the works in our hands, not in the result. However, doing something without expecting result is not quite possible always. But, taking this as the principle of our lives, at least we can try to come out from the after-effect of a failure as soon as possible.
To train our mind and inner self to be unperturbed even in the time of loss is perhaps the other important thing. We may introspect regularly about our lives; what we actually want here, how much the presence of something is important in our lives and so on. Yes, our introspection may not be effective all the time because of our limited vision or knowledge. But, practice of it will at least allow us to get rid of trivial negative feelings at the time of a failure. A better way of being indifferent to our negative thoughts is meditation. Perhaps, meditation per se will not reduce the lowly feelings of a failure, but, practicing of meditation for long period will help us to distance ourselves from our own thoughts. So, it is quite beneficial to get rid of stress and anxiety arising out of some unpleasant incident.
The journey of life offers us limitless opportunities to grasp. So, if we stumble few times, should we stop ourselves from walking? Answer is – definitely not. We need to move on. Anyways it is a short life, we should explore as much as we can in this journey.