Failure is a bruise, not a tattoo

??????????????? I’ve been through a lot of transitions in my life. Some have been good: going from living with parents to being a homeowner, from being a newlywed to being a father, or making the NCO ranks in the Army. Some have been extremely challenging, though no less voluntary: embarking on that military journey in my thirties, switching from blue-collar buckaroo to college student and eventually to physician. And some have been thrust upon me and decidedly unpleasant. But one thing I can tell you is that, as far as I’m concerned, transitions always suck.

??????????????? I’m the kind of guy that likes to stay in a rut once I’ve found it. Uncertainty gives me what my grandma used to call ‘conniptions’ (not so much the rage part, mostly the hysterics, at least on the inside). It seems that, no matter how hard I work at making things as smooth as possible, there’s always something coming out of left field that I didn’t anticipate, or someone upon whom I was depending, who dropped their ball at an inopportune time and then I’m left scrambling. And sometimes it's me dropping that ball, and it careens downhill taking out everything in its path. Thankfully joining the Army was one of my earlier transitions and my experiences there gave me a sound piece of advice:

??????????????? Adapt. Improvise. Overcome.

??????????????? The Marines have a similar, though decidedly more succinct expression: Semper Gumby, ‘always flexible’, referencing a kids’ show that I used to watch growing up and with which I’ve now dated myself. Yeah, I’m that old. It’s good advice, though. We’ve won two world wars thinking on our feet. A Russian strategist once famously commented “One of the serious problems in planning against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine”. And in a typically American fashion, is one of Murphy’s Laws of Combat: “Professional soldiers are predictable but the world is full of dangerous amateurs”. (There are a lot of gems in Murphy’s Laws of Combat. If you’ve never read them, I encourage you to look them up.)

??????????????? As I said a couple of paragraphs ago, sometimes those transitions are good, and sometimes they’re just… not. Sometimes you’ve literally bet the farm, and lost. Then what? The world is full of pithy sayings to help you keep your chin up through failure, like the one in this blog’s title by John Sinclair. Some other good ones I’ve heard are, When you feel you’ve been buried, maybe you’ve been planted. Bloom! Or, If you’re going through Hell, keep going! I’m sure you could think of several more, all offered by well-meaning folks who are trying to make you feel better about finding yourself in the midst of a crapshow. And that’s good, and you should thank those folks for caring, because a lot of people don’t.

??????????????? I’m not going to tell you everything is going to be okay. There’s no way to know that for sure and you and I both know that. Sometimes you just don’t even have a broom to sweep up the shards, never mind glue to put them back into some semblance of what they once were. But what I can tell you is that Mr. Sinclair had it right. Your successes you can usually frame and hang on your ‘love-me wall’ for the rest of Time and failure is only a bruise. It will heal. You will get through it, somehow, some way, though probably not in a way you’d expect. Sometimes those ill winds bring a kite with them! There will come a day when you will find yourself on the other side of those deep waters – even if the current took you way further downstream than you thought possible. And you will lose things along the way, because experience doesn’t come cheap (here’s another one, an old Chinese proverb: “In the course of a long and successful life a man must be prepared to abandon his baggage several times”). What you have to do, is keep going, and don’t be too proud to ask for help. Get up one more time than you fell down, even if you have to grab onto someone else’s hand to do it. There are a lot of really great people all around you who’ve done that already that you don’t even know about.

??????????????? Another gem from my days in the Armored Cav: The best way out of an ambush, is through it.

??????????????? Semper Gumby, my friends.