“All the elements for your happiness are already here. There’s no need to run, strive. At any moment, you have a choice, that either leads you closer to your spirit or further away from it.” Thich Nhat Hahn
“By listening with calm and understanding, we can ease the suffering of another person. Obstacles can be a form of liberation. Difficulties are required for success.” Thich Nhat Hahn
Failure
All of us have so many fears but perhaps the biggest one is the fear of failure. It kind of groups all the other fears together. Whether it is our spouse, parent, child boss friend or enemy we hate to drop the ball and be considered a loser. The trouble is we can’t really define just what a loser is or what it means. We have bad vibes about failing and never consider that there might be a bright side to fail.
What do our parents expect of us? Maybe they think we will forever be indebted to them and strive to please them. Most of us do appreciate our parents but there is a limit to what we can do for them and still be able to live our own lives. Failing to some of us is letting others down. If our parents expected us to be the engineer but we became the business guru, our parents are disappointed and they don’t have to say anything. We can sense it in their look or frown or words.
Parents
Parents bring on the first of the fears of failing. They push kids to accomplish goals that may not even be something their child wants. What parents consider important is sometimes not on the priority list of their kids. Seeing eye to eye on this is next to impossible. Even agreeing to disagree does not bring peace to the one who believes in their heart that they let their parents, people they love and cherish, down.
Likely the trick is to figure out why we sense a feeling of desperation when we have not done what another wants us to do. Somehow a person we love gets into our heads and makes us believe we should be what they desire us to be. In the end, we and they are disappointed. It comes down to the fact that we must love each other for what we are and not for what they want us to be or become.
Compassion
I know most parents want kids to be kind good and successful. Perhaps we should place compassionate, mindful and loving as some of the ways we delineate success. We can all choose to be compassionate and thoughtful towards others. We can love others with a kind heart. Working on those attributes is worthier than forcing our own goals and attitudes onto others.
Parents wield a lot of power. If they choose to pick for the child and demand success in the way they see it, likely everyone is going to live in stress and pain. Grown children expect parents to continue indulging them in ways that are invalid. When we have grown and matured we must take responsibility for ourselves even if it means failure at some points in our lives. We can and must grow from failure rather than succumb to it and feel defeated.
Stress
Failure never brings permanent defeat unless we give up and stop trying. Failure should teach us where we went wrong and therefore how we can do it better than before. Somehow our ideas are that once one has failed to give up, leave, walk away, try something or someone new. The stress caused by failure is full of anxiety, rage, and fear. We see the disappointment in the eyes and we can’t bear to witness it again so we stop and give up our objectives.
Husbands rarely live up to their wives’ anticipations. The wives hardly live up to their husband’s expectations. The marriage road is rocky, demanding and full of potholes. None of us can win and most of us lose and switch up the game because it is painful to keep playing it. We sense how hard we try and we are actually more disappointed in ourselves for the failure. Likely we blame ourselves but we still walk away.
It is easy for friends to disillusion us. There are so many possible friends out in the world that we move on. The same is true with relationships. We find someone new and begin again. We assume we will get it right the next time so life goes on. How many of us question what we are doing and why we are doing it. We believe perhaps that it is for the best because we can’t satisfy someone. I suppose that is true pleasing others is an impossibility. What is also true is that our opportunities appear to be boundless until we discover the let downs are similar. We might even yearn to go back to the original problems or situations and try again, although we usually can’t do that.
Love
We all need space to grow at our own pace. We need to love the most and fear and stress the least. I find that the truth is we place the fear, stress, and anxiety on ourselves when we believe we must please our parents, spouses children friends or boss. If we think it over we understand that if we disappoint anyone once in a while, they will get over it. If someone disappoints us we get over it. We have a hard time getting over ourselves and our own disappointments of failure.
Failure is not like the end of a road. It is more like a stop sign that slows us down. Perhaps that is a good thing because we get to review what we are doing and why. This may send us down a different path and also help us to engage the people we love in an alternative manner. We need space and encouragement. We need a sense of value and pride in us. If we please us then perhaps we won’t be as wounded when we don’t always please others. What we think about us when we look in the mirror is what really counts.
We all win
A sense of self leads to valuing others. If we are mindful of others we will likewise support their endeavors to be who and what they are. The freedom it endows us with is enlightening. Somehow we all win and we have not failed anyone especially not us. We have our own lives to live, goals to reach and problems to accept and overcome. People can best help us with support of all kinds and refraining from interfering in our choices.
Establish your own self-esteem and move forward with courage and strength. Don’t be swayed by what others say because they are seeing life through their eyes and we must open our eyes and see what it is we want. Stop judging so much and start living. We learn from mistakes and the learning sticks because of the pain of the error. If we can accept each other’s mistakes we can increase the relationship’s love and enthusiasm to do better the next time. Perhaps transformation from within is more of an answer than always attempting to alter outside of ourselves and our surroundings. Put the fears to rest and start living in serenity.
“I know you won’t believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others.” Socrates
“What screws us up the most in life is the picture in our head of what it’s supposed to be.” Socrates
“If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.” Socrates
