Re-Dos!

One day I was checking my Facebook, like I do everyday so it’s impossible to tell which day it was. But, anyway, I was reading my newsfeed and read one of my students statuses that said, “A dead end is a perfect place to turn around, and rock bottom is good solid ground to kick back up to the top.” When I read this I was like, “what is he talking about? He’s going scuba diving and he got lost?” and I re-read it. Isn’t that such a profound thing to say? I’m not sure if he wrote it or not, but he always says good things like this that he makes up, so I think he was quoting himself.

After I understood that he wasn’t being literal, I thought about how true that was. Even though we don’t see a dead end or rock bottom as optimistic things. We see them as failures. We’ve sunk to the bottom. We’ve reached a dead end. Those are both bad things. But each of these places have only one place to go. At a dead end, all you can do is turn around and go back and find the right road. When you’re at rock bottom, the only place you can go is up, you can’t get any lower. When we find ourselves at these places, we can’t focus on the fact that we’re failures. We need to focus on the fact that things won’t get any worse and that we can and will improve.

One day I was riding in the car with one of my friends, Guizella, and we missed our turn. When we realized this, she said, “Well, now we get to make a U-turn! Those are my favorites.” We need to be like Guizella and love turning around and getting another chance. She could have been embarrassed that she missed her turn, or frustrated that we would be late, or whatever. But she wasn’t. She was glad that she could make a U-turn and have another shot at finding the right road.

Tonight I was babysitting my neice and nephew, and we were watching Meet the Robbinsons. For those of you who haven’t seen that movie, it’s about a little orphan boy who is an inventor and his future self invents a time machine, but someone steals it and comes back to when he’s a little boy to ruin his future. His future son comes to fix the situation and ends up taking him to the future. It’s kinda confusing here, you should just go watch it, it’s really good. Anyway, while he’s in the future, one of the inventions his future self has invented, a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich maker, gets clogged or something, and he has to fix it. Well, it ends up exploding and he begins to apologize, but everyone is congratulating him on his failure. The teach him that he wouldn’t learn how to succeed without failing sometimes.

I think we should look at failure more this way. Without coming to our dead-ends and rock bottoms, we wouldn’t know how to be successful. We can’t cherish the good without the bad. If we were always successful, we wouldn’t know how to be proud for our accomplishments, and we probably wouldn’t even be trying at all. We can’t be afraid to fail, because then we won’t do anything, ever. But when we fail, we need to cash in our re-do’s and start over. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.