“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
~George Bernard Shaw.
A safe life or a daring life; what’s it to be?
During a recent bout of inexplicable sadness, like a fleeting period of gloominess, I just couldn’t put my finger on what exactly it was that was causing my grief. It was certainly the feeling of failure, but a broad and uncharted failure, and too many things of ranging sadness to really grasp.
After a short time I reacted at myself in anger — the customary and predictable secondary emotion masking the primary sadness. It wasn’t long, however, before I slunk back into my quiet, resigned and forlorn state.
The Gentle Allure of Sadness
We have to be careful with sadness for we’re drawn into a sinkhole very quickly. However, we also need to experience our raw sadness. That takes courage.
It’s the person who can take an awkward pleasure like sadness and conform that beast to truth that we admire. They take the pattern of failure, however acute or chronic, and they fashion it to suit their purposes. They gain even more usefulness out of it.
But in doing this, they warrant the beast freedom knowing the nemesis they deal with from the outset; a strange friend home at honesty. Sadness has a chunky sort of gait about it; its digestibility is forever questionable.
Experience is Primary to Celebration
We cannot fully vindicate celebration without going through the experience of the thing. We cannot, therefore, enjoy the product of our sadness without experiencing it, just as we cannot celebrate them or our destination from the other side without journey into or through it.
It is a wise and blessed person who, in the midst of it, can celebrate their sadness mid throe.
Just as wise and blessed is the person who actually celebrates the sadness from the other ‘got through’ side.
Pain can be friend; but only with God’s grace sponsoring the project.
Failure is not the end... it’s actually an important beginning.
© 2011 S. J. Wickham.
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