If life lessons happened every day, I have had over 11,000 opportunities to learn something new. So many of these daily life lessons appear to be cyclical and recurring. The one I have been encountering over and over lately is this: You can do everything right and still fail.
There appears to be a pervasive cultural myth that there is a "right" or a "wrong" way to do things. It motivates us to behave a certain way in order to get to a desired end. It is difficult to comprehend that if you truly do everything right that failure is even a possibility. Something tiny, unseen, or just misaligned makes the world appear fragile.
The fragility in the world is what I sometimes run into. Living in an RV year around, I have a keen connection to the fragility of the world around me. The freezing temperature of water is one example -- we are dependent on water that is kept above 32 degrees Fahrenheit, yet much of the U.S. freezes every night for much of the year. Life is fragile, but so are all of the systems around us.
Doing everything right is relative, but as it applies to life lessons, the trick is to keep all water flowing at above that 32 degree minimum. So many things can happen to restrict, stop, or divert the flow of liquid water. So many things can happen in the way our lives work to do the same with our life systems.
Relationships, jobs, school -- all of it is water. The trick is to keep all pipes warm and flowing. After applying to numerous full-time positions, networking for the right relationships, and building my identity for resilience and thoughtful living, I have found that I can still fail.
There was a time in my life when I thought that if I structured everything rigidly and followed the path of least resistance, I would succeed. I did -- I am succeeding -- but I am also failing. The life lesson is that every success is simultaneously a failure of something else. There are no right ways or true successes. There are only trade offs for success in one space for the sacrifice of another space.
My professional work experience brought relative success. I got out of college, landed a job before I graduated, and continued to work that job for a decade before I finally quit. In the meantime, I lost sight of what personal fulfillment was, the art of living a good life, and of how to be free from debt and the depression of captivity.
Right now, I can sleep until 9 AM every day if I want to, apply for jobs until my fingers go numb from typing, and I can still fail. I can flaunt my fancy resume with my fancy job history and my nearly four college degrees, and be sloughed out of every pile of applicants on count of being "overqualified" or even "under-qualified." I can be the most loving, attentive, generous, and caring boyfriend in the world and still be discarded like garbage. I can preemptively replace car parts and take special care of all of my vehicle systems and still have a car break down on part of a faulty part.
The life lesson is not just that one can do everything right and still fail, but that for every failure, there is a success. The success is that for every job that I am not selected for, every girl who is skeptical of my RV lifestyle, and for every car part that fails, I am able to get back up, brush myself off, and come back stronger than before. For every negative life lesson, there is a positive one -- we can only choose which lesson to focus on. For every action, there is an equal or opposite reaction.
No comments:
Post a Comment