For my friend Maya, who is setting off on a new adventure, I wanted to look at all sides of life, not just the high points, to touch on the realities of being human. I included these words from Diane Sawyer. I think this quote provides an important message about handling failures and disappointment:
When you are blue or lonely or stricken by some humiliating thing you did…the cure and the hope is in caring about other people.
– Diane Sawyer
There is no doubt that you will make mistakes and missteps as you live your life. The goal is not perfection, – being someone who does everything perfectly – THAT is an impossible task. To set that as the benchmark for your success is to drive yourself towards insanity, disappointment and a life lived in fear of failure. None of us are perfect, yet when we muster the courage to share our failures, debacles, and lessons learned we become real and relatable. Suddenly we are the person we always wanted to become via the hardships we encounter along the way.
The best stories, the best plot lines, the ones we want to read or watch are the ones where the hero falls down and gets back up…over and over and over again. These tales help us realize that part of the human condition is learning from failure and daring to believe that our next attempt will be better. We all want to have the hope that our ideas will be successful, yet in the real world in which we live not all ideas are viable. Some ideas need to end right away to lead us towards a better path. Other ideas need to simmer or percolate into existence. and still others may take decades to come to fruition.
Our best life is not created by grabbing everything we see and putting it in our shopping cart all at once. Shoving ideas into our world like we’re preparing for a weather event or building a life as if it were the midnight, fifty percent off sale at our favorite store. The most fulfilling and meaningful lives are the ones where time, trails, and talent work together to create the foundation and storylines we live out each day. Our ideas and talents build on each other to help us become the person who represents the values we want to see more of in this world. This takes patience with ourselves and it takes time. Life is about collecting experiences and wisdom not about curating the perfect look.
How do we do all this? How do we gain wisdom and learn lessons without driving ourselves mad? It may sound odd, yet it’s true…we care about other people. We live each day hoping to be able to make one person’s life better. We think, plan, pay attention and simply encourage, lift up other people. We plant seeds of goodness. Eventually those seeds some back to us and we become the person we always wanted to be. We grow up. We learn the lessons and then share them along our journey. We live a life from a collection of adventures and experiences not just one based on consumption, perfection and winning.
No matter how it goes, life is best lived when we learn and then share that learning with others. Diane Sawyer said it beautifully – our hope is in caring about other people.
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