40+FAB Blog

From time to time we go through disappointments in life, maybe dished out by someone we relied on or more painfully by ourselves.
Someone said, don’t let a passing phase become a dwelling place. Too often we are ready to set up camp at the place of a debilitating disappointment.

I remember a close friend of mine in high school whose situation taught me a big lesson. As we were moving to the next level, his grades were not good enough and so he was made to repeat the year while the rest of us moved up. He was gutted and moaned about what would become of him and I worried for him and wondered how he would cope with the shame.
After the long summer holidays, we all came back for the new term, I was expecting to see my friend still hurting about his lot, but I was pleasantly surprised by him. His family had interested him in electronics over the holiday and he had spent time learning and building stuff. He came back to school with a remote controlled car he had made himself and other gadgets too, we were all intrigued by this and no one remembered his predicament.

Years later when I finished from Uni, we reconnected again and he was working as a senior engineer at a very large electronics company in the UK, while most of us who moved up to the next level at high school were still trying to find our feet in the work place.

In contrast to this story, I had an acquaintance in Uni who failed his 1st year and was asked to leave. He never told anyone, not even his parents, and he stayed on pretending to be a student. We only got to find out in our 3rd year, he had wasted 3 whole years because he did not want to live up to his disappointment. 

Whatever we go through is never permanent, as surely as there is night, the day will follow. We need to always put things in perspective and keep moving forward as long as we have life. Defeat is never final when we choose to rise from the ashes.