You will falter. You will fail. But will you rise, and rise again?
Life has certain guarantees. Many of these set-in-stone realities hold us back from experiencing life and all of its wonders, both good and bad, in its truest sense.
Death is a guarantee. You will die. I will die. In fact, with each breath we take we’re inching closer to that final dirt nap, or as I’ve told those closest around me, my final resting place will be on a handmade barge where my dead body will be set aflame by an archer’s flaming arrow shot from ashore.(Read this: 5 Way to Conquer Your Fear of Death)
Death holds us back when it should provide us with urgency. Death, and its cousin pain, keep many of us from experiencing adventure. The act of living can best be felt within adventure.
It’s in adventure, amidst danger where our lives become immediate, there is nothing but the moment and we feel everything. Our thoughts become in tune with our bodies and an exhilarating joy embraces us along with the rush of a very real and immediate fear.
Failure is also guaranteed in life. In fact, the more you try and the higher you aim, the more numerous and grand your failures will be.
This fact that failure exists and follows those who put themselves out there, who try and work and hustle, prevents many from trying and working and hustling in the pursuit of a goal that means much to them.
Why try if I’m almost guaranteed to fail?
The logic is sound, but utterly idiotic. If you don’t try you also embrace one of life’s other guarantees; that, as Lincoln said, “Good things come to those who wait, but only what’s left behind by those who hustle.”
When you fail to even try, when you quit after your first try, you relegate yourself to the life of a bottom feeder, gaining sustenance off the scraps of those who’ve done the work and persisted through the toughest struggles.
You will fail, but in persisting through failure you will also learn.
Those who learn the most and the most often typically succeed to the greatest heights.
The guarantees in life are a constant. They cannot be avoided, nor reasoned with, nor tricked or coerced. You can defeat them, but you cannot go around them, you must go through them, within them.
The question, then, isn’t whether or not you’re going to die or if you’re going to fail, but will you rise?
Will you let the possibility of death keep you small? Will you let the possibility of pain keep you afraid? Or will you face life’s challenges like a man, head held high.
You will fail, either in doing or by not doing, so you may as well be a man of action, the alternative makes little sense.
Will failure be your end, or will it be a lesson?
Every time you fail you are given an opportunity. Even if that failure tells you what not to do, you’ve learned something. If that failure tells you nothing, you still have the opportunity to become tougher and stronger by picking yourself up and moving forward despite your failure.
It’s toughness and grit that will serve you best in this life. Life isn’t to be lived on the side-lines, nor in feeding from the scraps left by those in the arena. (Read this: How to Be a Man of True Grit)
Life is made for the man in the arena, who has the audacity to give his all no matter what the critics will say.
