Failure is NOT an Option? Since when?

I don't believe in reincarnation, but I was once a green sea turtle; to this day, I love the ocean. I was also once a rabbit eaten by a hawk; even now, if I sense danger, I will retreat down a hole in the ground. But I don't believe in reincarnation.

Not that I have anything against the concept of endlessly returning to life until I overcome some horrible character trait that makes the karmic forces spit me back because I leave a bad after-death taste in their mouth. It's just that reincarnating a well-behaved if somewhat timid rabbity-sort of sea turtle would serve no good purpose to anyone unless you are a hawkish sort of person. Or perhaps a shark.

My issue with reincarnation is this underlying sense that we are returned to life (in a new body of course with its own new set of "issues") because we failed some karmic test in the previous life. And we continue to be returned to life until we pass that and any new karmic tests at which time we then die and cease to exist...but happily so.

No freakin' duh. If you've returned to life a few hundred times, each time with a new body and imperfect soul, and given 80 or so years to figure out your new soul's errant ways and correct them while trying to also remember your old soul's miscreant behavior, all amongst a gazillion other souls returned with similar handicaps, basically enjoying (as Steven King says) SSDD, when you finally do attain perfection and cease to exist, why wouldn't your corpsy grey being do the happy dance?

Who the hell thought of such a stupid idea?! Recycled life, BAH HUMBUG.

HowEVER, IF upon death we really DO go down some conveyor line where workers with expert inner-eyesight stand and pick out the souls that have blemishes and imperfections and toss us by the scruff of our spirit necks into bushels of likekind and then other workers, big brawny guys with muscles like tree trunks come pick UP the bins of imperfect souls and haul them away to a juicing room where we are dumped without ceremony into a great vat of heated rejuvenation liquid and boiled into soft mush then poured into NEW soul-shaped molds and stored in a cooling room until we are firm and ready for worldly consumption again, IF this is even remotely possible, I apologize to the karmic forces for saying hell and calling your idea stupid. It's not really. Recycling life is very green of you, and I support it 100%.

(please don't return me to life as a rabbit again, please please please, can't I be the hawk this time?)

Seriously, though, life is about failure. We start life with no skills whatsoever beyond sucking and pooping, and those even take practice. Why, then, are we not accustomed to failure from early on? Why do we spend our whole lives being devastated by failure?

There are, of course, all sorts of placating one-liners to help mitigate the damage we inflict upon ourselves when we fail. But does it really help when we tell someone who has just failed at something they really, really, really wanted to succeed at that "the only real failure is the failure to try?"

It's a fact of life that we will fail. Some of us go longer than others between failures. Some of us are blessed enough to not fail for a very long time. And some of us fail so spectacularly that nothing else is talked about for months on end.

But to the one who is accustomed to reaching for the moon and finding it within her reach, to the one who is trying so hard now to grab at the moon and finding she is short of the mark, to that one I say this:

Look where you are standing, honey. No, you didn't reach the moon, you may not feel like you even reached the stars surrounding it. But you ARE standing on a mountaintop, the highest one. And the tip of the mountain is glazed in snow, the alpine meadows are in bloom, and the hills below are a riot of deep rich colors. The mountaintop is not at all a bad place to be.

And the moon is still there.

Failure is what it is - an ongoing part of life. And yes, it takes practice to fail with grace and dignity and without letting it destroy us. But failure is NOT our life, it's just a part of it and a small part at that even if at times it seems to be the rule and not the exception.

Your goal is not going to move out of your reach. And every time you reach for it, you stretch yourself a little bit more and come a little bit closer to that goal.

EVERY DAY, YOU GET CLOSER TO YOUR GOAL.

And you know what, sweetie? I am on the mountaintop with you because when you were born, a little bit of my soul held onto that new life and follows it wherever it goes. A woodnymph's twist on reincarnation and way better, I think, than a turtle or a hawk.

"When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another." Helen Keller