Failure? No!

It was a harrowing period of designs, documents, coding and testing. Tough as it was, I enjoyed every moment of it. Working with the experts, arguing about working styles and being excused for goof-ups, it's simply an amazing learning experience. The biggest lessons were on cutting through the ice and accepting failures. 

You think failure is this goddawful thing and wish it would never happen to you. Everyone around you is saying that there is something to learn from "the experience". You might have said the same to someone else but it's hard to remember that when it happens to you. You try to find the lesson(s) you were supposed to learn but fail miserably. Maybe you are an exceptional case. Maybe there is no lesson in this failure. Maybe the lesson is that you can fail. You wish you did not have to learn that this way. Maybe it should have been something milder. You are going in circles, wishing nobody will notice, hoping that no one will know about it. 

I was done going through the myriad of feelings ranging from shock to confusion to sorrow to anger. Or so I thought. Suddenly, there is a phone call. Then someone leaves you an instant message. Somebody else is asking if you are okay. You do not know what to make of it. Are they feeling sorry for you? Are they just being polite? Sympathy? You do not want any of it. You wish they did not know. The whole range of emotions resurface.

Left with no choice, you cut your way through the jungle of feelings and fears. It turns out that what you just earned from this experience is priceless. You find who your friends are! It is not a lesson that failure gave you but a gift. What are friends for? Holding your hand every step of the way, guiding you when you did not even know you needed to be guided, letting you make all those mistakes and helping you pick up the pieces to start over, helping you see clearly when tears cloud your eyes... it is the stuff dreams are made of. Is this what they call a pleasant surprise?

I wondered where it would all lead to. It only got better with time. Things that I would only want and not really expect started coming true. When one door closed, another opened, as the cliche goes. If I had to turn back time and change something, there is not one thing I can come up with. Thank God for friends!