What does am person do with all the dreams that don't come true...dreams of emerging talents, dreams of being famous and rich? Do they manage to hold on to the memories of those dreams without being weighed down by them, without letting their unfulfilled dreams define them as failures. Others let themselves be defined not by their dreams but by their disappointment.
What happiness to the dreamers, all those people whose lives haven't turned out as they hoped and planned? What do you do when you are confronted with rejection or failure, when a door is closed in your face, a door through which you very much wanted to entered? How do you find the will to go on when you realize that the life you are living is not the one you had been looking forward to?
Every disappointment, every rejection, every dream that doesn't come true leaves a wound in a person's soul. The question is not....can I get through life without failures and rejections? because you can't....and the more you aspire to in your life, the more you yearn for, the more scars you will accumulate along the way. The real question is...how will you respond to those disappointment? Will you respond with bitterness, envy and self-doubt, or with resilience and wisdom. I can't tell you the number of people who are so cautious with love once they got their heart broken. I have known too many people who lost the ability to dream after having had their heart broken. I remember listening to the song "The Rose" and remembering this one line...."it's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance"
Perhaps failure and disappointment can teach us that we may fail at one thing, we may fail at several things, but that does not mean that we are failures as people. The worth of a person's soul is not measured by the size of their bank account or the volume of applause a person evokes...but by one's humanity, by one's compassion, even by the courage to keep dreaming amid the broken pieces of our earlier dream.
Viktor Frankl's Man Search for Meaning...."Everything can be taken from a man but the last human freedoms, the right to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. In other words....what happens to you, no matter how hurtful or unfair, is ultimately less important than what you do about what happens to you.
When the real world turns out to be a lot less friendly than we dreamed it would be, do we give up and settle for what the world is willing to give us without a struggle? Do we rail against God for the unfairness of life?
I don't deny the reality of what is happening to me. I know that pain and rejection are part of life, and I respond to my shattering dreams by saying...."I've learned how painful life can be and I want more of it because there is so much in life that is good and I don't want to miss out on it. It might be that instead of giving us a friendly world that would never challenge us and therefore never make us strong, God gave us a world that would inevitably break our hearts, and compensated for that by planting in our souls the gift of resilience.
Everything I've ever done has led me to where I find myself today. It is only after many surprise and choices, detours and disappointments, that I have arrived somewhere I could never have anticipated. I doubt that many of us find ourselves, for better or for worse, exactly where we pictured ourselves being ten, twenty years ago...and I suspect that many of us contemplated where we find ourselves today with a mixture of regret and astonishment.
How many of us remained for our entire lives in the first job we ever applied for? How many of us went on to marry the first person we ever found attractive and remained married to that person forever? It was only by a process of rejecting and being rejected that we learned who we were and what we were meant to do with our lives.
When life has dealt you a painful blow, let it hurt but trust yourself to get over it. Just as our bodies grow flabby if they are not challenged by hard work and exercise...our sol can grow falbby if they never encounter adversity. There is no such thing as a life without struggle...there is no one who does not have to choose sometimes...some way between giving up and growing stronger. There is no one who has not know what it is to lose in the game of life....the essence of struggle is the decision to become new rather than simply to become older...no one comes out of struggle, out of suffering the same person they were when they went in. Some come out worse, soured on life, other come out stronger and wiser....
We learn from our mistakes and find ways to pick up the broken pieces of shattered dreams, we can go on to re-create our lives out of the rubble of our initial failures. And ultimately we become wiser and more complex as our youthful ideals are replaced by more realistic ones. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places...but there are injuries of our soul that can't be repaired and injuries to our sensibilities which may hurt but will heal. When we open our hearts to pain an suffering, we begin to heal, not because suffering is redemptive but because it opens our heart.
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