What do You See in the Mirror

When you stand in front of a mirror, can you honestly say that you have tried your hardest? (photo/JHDT productions)

Two balls, two strikes, the bottom of the ninth inning, your team is down by one with a runner on second, and you are up to bat. The pitcher throws you a nasty curveball on the outside half of the plate, you swing and miss.

Often, life throws a curveball when we are down in the count. Most of the time, we strike out, we fail. 

Failure is a fact of life; it happens to all of us at one point or another. We lose a job; we get cut from a team, we fail the exam that we have been preparing weeks for.

I recently went through a particularly taxing failure. I thought that the aspect of life that I had failed at defined me, for many years of my life, it did define me. I devoted countless hours a week on this aspect of my life and cared more deeply for this part of myself than any other. Just the other day, it was ripped from under my feet.

I had failed.

Some people say that a failure should not define a person; however, the way we react and learn from these failures does. I have often been told that in life if you can look in the mirror and honestly say that you worked the hardest that you could and learned something along the way, there is nothing to be ashamed of after you fail.

I realize now that I worked as hard as I could at my recent failure. I devoted all of my life to it and learned a great deal from it. Sometimes, you can do all of this and still fail, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Often these failures open new doors in our lives that would not have been possible before.

Failure is a necessary fact of life, it may be confusing and painful at first, but in the end, it teaches us to work hard and strive for greatness.