How to fail good.

"The goal of life becomes individual glory and greatness. The failure to achieve these aspirations, to be who we should be, seems to diminish us. As we age, as life deals its blows of fortune and bad luck, as we face the harsh reality of human limitations, our own limitations, we become resentful. We hate ourselves for failing."

~ Chris Hedges, Losing Moses on the Freeway

I relate to this perhaps a bit too much, LOL. Living in America, perhaps we're fed the lie too much, that anything is possible, when it's not. I wanted to be published fourteen years ago. I never dreamed I'd be this age and still unaccomplished. But it seems the lie exists apart from any type of reality, especially individual realities with so many bumps in the road that keep us from realizing this gilded dream. And feeling like a failure sucks.

He goes on:

"All lives, at their deepest level, are failures. We fail to be the person we want to be; this is inevitable for we are human. We will fail to achieve all we want to achieve. We fail those who love us in small and large ways. We are failed by them. We suffer betrayal and feel unappreciated. We are never as good as our expectations. We never overcome all our faults. We act in ways that are foolish, inconsistent, mean or thoughtless. This is part of our ordinariness, part of the failures inherent in human life.

"But only if we can accept this failure and our ordinariness, only if we can have the courage to face this wounding pain, can we find sustaining joy and happiness."