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Of Downfalls and Come-backs

The story of failures are often more interesting than successes.

You start with a goal in mind. You break it down into multiple smaller goals.

You schedule your time, and work diligently towards completing each one of them. 

You put all of your heart , mind, soul , time , energy and sacrifice to make this one thing work.

Then you put it out in the world.

But the world owes you nothing, and that one thing fails.

You have dedicated yourself to the results, but still the results elude you.

This is failure.

Failure sneaks up on you while you are unaware, and now you have to face the consequences.

You get "feedback" from others. You ask yourself, how could I let this happen ? 

You start seeing yourself get stuck in a loop of reflection and guilt, and it all seems to crumble down.

Meanwhile, the world is oblivious to all of this. The birds are singing, flowers are blooming, and the sun completes its cycles.

The disconnect between an internal whirlwind, and external calm, is mind-boggling. 

This phase can get vicious, and can sabotage your day to day life.

There is an interesting fact about road accidents. The first car almost never kills you. 

It is when a person is startled by a close encounter with a fast vehicle, that they start panicking. This panic, grips the person, and many a times leads to a fatal crash with another on-coming vehicle.

You can often recount, days where everything just goes berserk. One moment you are going about your day, and the next you discover that you made a mistake. You observe that as you then try to go about your day and complete the other things, the thoughts about the mistake consume you. You are no longer able to focus on the task at hand, and then you make more mistakes, adding to the stress.

Defence mechanisms : 

Each person has their own arsenal of defence mechanism for situations like this. 

Some people start venting with their peers. 

Some try to carve out some alone time, to think and reflect.

Some try to indulge in any distraction of their choice ( Drinks, Drugs, Content etc ... )

Come Backs : 

To make a come-back from such a situation, can feel almost unfathomable,  in that moment.

However as time passes, and the catastrophe seems slightly far away, people start coming back to their senses. 

In this place, you have a set of choices : 

1. Feel helpless : I feel bad about this mistake. Such bad things keep happening to me, why is the world like this ?

2. Transfer blame :  I feel bad about this mistake. . But X person/situation was the reason this happened

3. Trivialise :  I feel bad about this mistake. But it does not matter that much. Such things keep happening, I should move on.

4. Reflect :  I feel bad about this mistake. What lessons does this teach me ? Can I extract anything useful for my future action plans from this situation. How do I make sure that this does not get repeated ?

All of the choices do get employed by people. However only in refection can you actually find some lessons. It the hardest choices of them all, but it is also the only useful and helpful one.

 

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