Nothing In Life Is Perfect

I occasionally find myself a bit off course from where I may have been headed. Busy days and the tendency to rely on my ever-aging memory when I should jot things down inevitably leads to missing things. Playing catch-up and gathering all those forgotten or skipped over items can actually be interesting.

There's little point in getting frustrated by revisiting things, making additional trips or having to redo something entirely, because that kind of mindset won't make getting on top of any of it easier. It might actually make it more difficult. As I get older, I have realized that the things I've absent-mindedly missed aren't usually detrimental to my overall journey. The time-sensitivity and relative importance of getting these things done are usually not set in stone as I might initially have thought them to be, but rather flexible enough to get to whenever I manage to get to them.

It is easy to allow our preconceived views about tasks and responsibilities to wreak havoc on our mindsets and sense of accomplishment. We are all too often our own worst critic. Being able to step away from whatever failure we believe to have allowed or created affords us the opportunity to lighten up on our expectations of ourselves. It is quite possible that missing that turn and having to spend ten minutes re-routing, delaying our plans, trip or arrival was necessary for the overall outcome of something in our life. Not getting to an errand or chore, or missing something we were looking forward to might present the benefit of hindsight upon contemplating how it was skipped over in the first place.

When we resist the urge to see failing as a negative thing, we open up the possibilities of doing a better job next time, being more prepared than we would have been originally and even being more open and aware of the impact or meaning that would otherwise have been lost had we succeeded the first time around. Failure is learning. It is an opportunity to practice and master. When we fail, we grow, so long as we focus on 'failing forward'.