Seeds: Life's Lessons
You had a bad experience. You spent all day writing and turned up with nothing. You had an interview, and it didn’t go well. You sent your manuscript to an agent; they sent it back with a preprinted “no thanks.” The movie deal fell through. The publishing deal fell through. Your writing partner quit. Your agent died. AI wrote a book better than yours. Life sucks. But maybe you were looking at it wrong. Let’s look at it right.
I used to think a lot about my experience, all the things I did right, things that worked out for the best, and things I gambled on and paid off. It made me feel good to think about such things. I learned a lot in those experiences, but thinking about all the positives was a half-baked move on my part. I wasn’t looking at the whole picture. Experience means things are done right, no doubt. But, many times, it is the things that are done wrong.
It's easy to feel that if something works, we must do it again. It is tried and true. But the same can be said for the things that don’t work out. Do we feel the same excitement towards those? Not really. We do our best to forget them, which is the worst thing we can do. Good or bad, we should analyze every step we take in life. We can repeat success, but we can also repeat problems. Sometimes, the failures hurt worse than the successes feel good. Instead of leaving failures at that, we should give them the same critical attention, focus, and scrutiny that we give the achievements. This is where the real learning lies, and it's a powerful tool for personal growth and improvement.
There is a funny thing about failures. They highlight a deficiency or a short-sightedness, even a severed myopia, in us. Or maybe, as I had as a child, a completely lazy eye. When we fail to analyze those failures – take the emotion out of it – and look at the situation (yes, it hurt that the agent sent back the manuscript, but why did they send it back?), then we come out the other side better sometimes with our failures than we do with our successes, if we will learn to appreciate both equally. There is a peculiar thing about failures. If left alone, they will come back, not just once even, but over and over repeatedly until their source is identified and corrected. I know this is true in my own life. If I didn’t get the lesson right the first time, I – as my Grandmother Parker would say – I’d be given a second dose. Sometimes, I was dense and had to take a whole prescription.
The point of all this is that there are lessons all around us. Our problem is not the situation – good or bad – but the judgment we make – that misconception that something is good or bad. Instead, I’ve learned over the years to step away from emotion and judgment and look at the elementary proposition: did it work out how I wanted it to, or not? If it did, what did I do that made it work? What did I do that produced the less-than-desirable end if it didn't? I then fix it. If I don’t fix it, it will come back. And bad results and bad situations are like some amorphous ghost. They change forms, but they are always the same evil spirit. This self-reflection is a key to understanding our actions and their consequences, leading to a deeper self-awareness.
Lessons are all around us. Maybe the universe knows better than we do. Perhaps it’s a blessing that the agent didn’t take us. We don’t know what is ahead. Maybe it is a blessing that we wrote 2,453 words today that were pure junk. Perhaps we learned not to waste our time and write what we wrote. Maybe we realized we have more of a discerning eye. Possibly, we knew that those 2,453 useless words taught us more than the last 10,000 we thought were beautiful.
In my life, I’ve learned the hypothesis to be true: we reap what we sow. What we fail to do too many times, though, is once we start reaping, we focus so much on what we have got that we don’t stop and look at the seed. The seed. That’s the real blessing or curse. Only by looking at the seed do we realize what we want to plant and, knowing logically and objectively what we wish to, we know what seed we want to cultivate. Life is chocked with great lessons. None are good or bad. All give us what we want or do not want. Only with reflection do we learn to plant the seeds of the results we wish to reap. Give yourself a little forgiveness. Sometimes, it takes a few weeds to do that. And that is okay.
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