My understanding from my failures..

Am I a failure? Everyone must have come across this question atleast once in your lifetime. And many of the times the answer’s surely been yes. Well, it is the same for me as well or atleast it used to be. In my life there have been numerous times where I’ve thought that I’ve been a complete good for nothing.

I’ve really had my reasons to think that way to be honest. Let’s take a look at my badminton career. It turned out to be average at best, inspite of showing great early promise. I mean, I took decisions which were pretty much like ‘digging your own graveyard’ types. And then finally at the time when I got fed up and quit I was left with just an average job. Even though I met the girl who I ended up marrying through badminton, the marriage was in such a circumstance that it couldn’t be celebrated(mom was suffering from cancer, we decided to get married so that she can see it and go). Looking back at my badminton career would seem to be a total failure for so many reasons. I mean, imagine the scale of my failure here, I wasted 2 decades of my life, stayed away from home since I was 15 and ended up with a very average job, no money, hardly any recognition on a mass scale. All that I had dreamt of  were very far away from my grasp at the time of saying ‘Adios’ to badminton. And believe me, it was very frustrating at that point. Only my wife could maybe relate to my state of mind that time. 

But, I’m writing this today not to let the world know of my frustrations. I’m writing this out of gratitude. I’m writing this because now I’ve finally realised that all those failures and dreadful moments were really necessary for me to be where I am today. Those were all necessary steps. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve not turned into a billionaire or a very reputed person now. I’m still living a very middle class life, married with a son and the usual average material things, paying up bank loans for those and this and that. Generally in a story like this, there’s always that ‘look at me now, I’ve gone on to achieve this and that and all.’ Not with mine yet. 

So what changed then? It is my way of looking at things. That change was through spirituality. Spirituality made me realise that all this while I was just looking at life from one particular perspective. The perspective of being materialistically successful. I was just judging myself on my journey as a badminton player and what I’ve materialistically achieved in that. I realised that I was being very rigid with my viewpoint. Spirituality taught me to be less rigid. It taught me to look at life in a way we all should. It taught me that the journey was great in many other aspects which are generally intangible. It taught me to look at it multidimensionally. Life is manifolds, the moment we fix our perspective through one particular way we become rigid. And with rigidity comes tremendous pain, agony, jealousy, envy, anger and negativity in general. 

I want to be a bit clearer here about spirituality. It is not something very hard to grasp. You don’t need to be a worshipper for that. It is just the understanding of things the way it is. It is just the understanding that no perspective of yours or anybody’s as such is perfect. So, we don’t need to be judging or slating ourselves based on the apparent failure or failures. We just need to understand that situations in life become a failure only through our own perspective and nothin else.

Om Shanti..?