The other day I was reading a quotation in the newspaper, saying that Love and failure are the only two things that give you maturity. Today when I met Simran, my childhood friend I realized how true this fact is. Try to think about the people, who have never fallen in love or have never suffered a major failure in life, you’ll quite probably feel a lack of maturity among them. And this is evident from their thoughts, actions, and reactions.
Failure and Emotions
They have never realized the deepest emotions and the feelings that come up when one has failed. When some big failures or heartbreaking events take place in our lives, most of us go through a phase of depression and detachment for some time. The time depends on how serious you were about the thing you just lost. And these are the times that give us an insight into all that life is. These times take us deep down somewhere away from everything. When we come out of them we realize that there is much that is beyond what we have lost.
Do read: Celebrating Failure, Really?
Lose Someone
When we lose someone, we tend to feel that it is the end of the world and we are into a gloom that we feel will never end. We get disinterested in everything and everyone around us. But after some time you start feeling that there are other things and options too in this world and your life. With the passage of time, you start coming out of your shell. It is during this state that you start appreciating numerous other things. And the most important thing is that you start knowing yourself better than ever before.
You start recognizing your hidden desires, the things you always wanted to do but were too engrossed in other things to pay attention to them.
Thought
You start giving thought to your talents, abilities, and capabilities. Many people take to their artistic instincts. They either go ahead to learn something or improve upon it if they have already learned something. The difference between the earlier learning and now is that a level of maturity and depth is added. The way you look at things is changed. You might have acquired an artistic skill earlier just to add it to a list of things you know because you had a liking for it, or because it was thrust upon you since your early days.
But now you put yourself into these things to have peace for yourself or you like these things to be your companions in solitude.
Simran
A few years back Simran was very good at language and would do just about anything to enrich it. She had many interests that made her popular in every kind of group. She was twenty-three then and just out in the professional world. As a human, she also fell in love with a colleague of hers. She was totally absorbed in her dream world. But before her dreams could take a real form, they were shattered. That is when she went into a shell and refused to believe anybody and preferred to stay aloof.
If she had to be in the company of others, she would maintain such silence that each one around would feel the heat of discomfort. The best of her friends could not make her speak and one by one started drifting apart. She stayed in this state for about a year. Then all she would do was stare at the ceiling of her room with her mind wandering around what has happened.
After a year or so she started breaking the shell at least for herself. She joined a study group to study some ancient scriptures. She always had a desire to read them but could never manage time for it as it was divided among all the persons she was associated with in the past and there were things which always took priority. Now that she has distanced herself from all such distractions and was completely available to herself, whatever she did have cent percent concentration.
Reading
She also started putting her free time into reading. This helped her nourish her thirst for fulfilling her literary interests. She restarted her classical dance practice. Still, she was not very interested in talking to anybody and was happiest when all alone. But she did not let her mind wander here and there. And would put it into doing things that satisfied the person inside her.
Express
In the process when she had a need to express herself, she could not relate herself to anybody. It was not that people around her were not ready to listen to her or would not have understood her and her feelings. After all, we all go through it sometimes or the other may be to a different extent. But as a matter of belief, she did not want to express herself. This made her one day sit and write about all that she needed to express. All the reading that she had been doing, helped her to emerge as a writer.
Author
Today she regularly writes for a periodical and the writer in her is a gift of all the suffering that she had gone through. The literary interests and the appreciation of language were always there. But it was her suffering and her failure in love that brought maturity to her thought. It was her detachment from the world that gave her enough time and concentration to put herself so well on the paper.
Positive Impact
The positive aspect of the whole story is that with the flow of time not only is Simran coming out of her depression. A new human being is taking birth inside her who does not get disturbed easily by life’s turmoil. Probably because she has already seen the worst. Now she has an attitude that is more understanding of other person’s emotions and feelings. Acceptance of life as it is and not how she wanted it to be.
Persons who can see their death approaching, are the ones who live life to the fullest. Similarly when a person has suffered enough or has lost people dearest to them, start looking at life with a different perspective.
So failure is not all that bad. Imagine all that we miss if we miss failure in life.
Updates on Failure
It is the inability to achieve a desired outcome. It can be a personal or professional setback, or it can be a larger-scale event. Something like it can be caused by a number of factors, including mistakes, bad luck, or unforeseen circumstances.
There are many different types of failures, but some of the most common include:
- Personal: These are failures that occur in our personal lives, such as failing a test, getting fired from a job, or breaking up with a partner.
- Professional: These are failures that occur in our professional lives, such as failing to meet a deadline, losing a client, or being passed over for a promotion.
- Systemic: These are failures that occur in large systems, such as businesses, governments, or organizations. They can be caused by a number of factors, including poor planning, inadequate resources, or human error.
While it can be difficult, but it can also be a valuable learning opportunity. When we fail, we have the chance to identify our weaknesses, learn from our mistakes, and come back stronger than ever before.
Some of the benefits
- It teaches us resilience. When we fail, we learn that we can bounce back from setbacks. This resilience is an important life skill that can help us overcome challenges in the future.
- It helps us grow and learn. Failure can teach us valuable lessons about ourselves and the world around us. When we fail, we have the opportunity to reflect on our mistakes and figure out what we can do differently next time.
- It makes us more humble. It can help us to realize that we are not perfect and that we can make mistakes. This humility can help us to be more open to feedback and to learn from others.
Of course, it can also be painful and discouraging. However, if we can learn to view it as a learning opportunity, it can be a valuable asset in our lives.
Tips for dealing with it
- Allow yourself to feel your emotions. It is normal to feel disappointed, angry, or even ashamed when you fail. Allow yourself to feel these emotions, but don’t let them consume you.
- Identify the lessons you can learn. What went wrong? What could you have done differently? Take some time to reflect on your failure and learn from it.
- Don’t give up. Failure is not the end of the world. It is just a setback. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and keep going.
Failure is a part of life. It is something that we will all experience at some point. However, it doesn’t have to define us. If we can learn from our failures and use them as an opportunity to grow, they can actually make us stronger.
