Have you failed? Lift yourself up immediately and take the lead, at the frontline of battle and service. Do not surrender to complaints or desertions: they involve even greater losses than the ones that you have already suffered. If you act with consciousness, applying everything that you have learned in the defeat you suffered, you may rise from the ashes, so much better than before, precisely for bringing the experience acquired from the error and the stimulus to never again fall into the fault that the pain of failure offers.
I know this is easier said than done. But, nevertheless, understand that only through unrelenting attempts will we come to the condition of unwavering champions of virtue. Learning does not happen at once. The repetitions are indispensable for the proper retention of new knowledge. Do not expect, then, things to work differently for you.
Today, you failed again. You had a slip up that you no longer expected to have. You saw yourself as weak as never before and got upset with yourself. Cheer up, though. There is always a tomorrow, and tomorrow is never a mere repetition of yesterday, when we know how to fully live the today.
As the quantum leap principle reveals, when we least expect it, we notice ourselves in the next level of consciousness, moving toward new parameters of comprehension of the reality, not in a linear, sequential or logical way, but suddenly, as the result of complex subliminal processes, in the depths of our psyche.
Have patience, then, if your moment of change has not come. No one controls revolutions: they erupt, and it is up to us to take advantage of them and manage their forces when they arise. As for waiting, however, it is not a passive experience, but a conscious experience of learning, assimilating all the possible contents for your growth.
Ignore the number of times you have failed before. The error does not represent your failure as a person but is simply an experience necessary for your own development. Those who win are not the ones who did not fail before, but those who have fallen in error many times, in this or in other existences, because only in making mistakes may one learn, and only by learning is it possible to succeed.
Therefore, change your perspective about success and defeat. Appearances are deceptive. The essential is to not cower or to not give in to laziness. Make the effort, apply yourself, be decisive, persist. Your mistakes are your best teachers. Receive them with an open heart. Avoid sterile self-recriminations.
The depression and discouragement that comes to you as a result of finding yourself in error may, very well, constitute an elaborate mechanism of escape from responsibility and from work. No one ever has proposed to you that you should abandon the human condition, to participate in Eden, immediately. It will be your slim, modest, but constant achievements, in the field of the common good, through continuous determination to serve and to be useful, that will grant you the emblems of merit and virtue.
Do little, but always. If you cannot do much today, do less. If you cannot do it with the standard of quality you wish, do it with the one that is possible. If you definitely cannot do anything, do it tomorrow and make up for what you missed today.
But the idea is: if you wait for ideal occasions to do the good, they will never arrive, even because it is precisely within these opportunities of difficulty that one develops new capacities to do better and more intensely the good that is desired.
Today is your day of change, through the realization of what is viable, even if only in the invisible field of the ideal. Do and give your best, today. Do not leave it for tomorrow, because tomorrow perhaps you may not have the energy you have now, perhaps the mystical chain that kept the ideal alive will have been broken, precisely because of the undue delay you have allowed yourself.
Now is your moment. It is in this moment of darkness that anything can happen. If you lament because the darkness confuses you, know that it is precisely in the midst of the dark night of the soul, as St. John of the Cross said, that everything we consider unfeasible in times of crisis has the opportunity to expand and consolidate: the tenacity, the enthusiasm, the will, the persistence, the spirit of ideal, the optimism, the fighting spirit.
If everything is well, nothing promotes growth. Therefore, it is only when everything seems to hinder evolution that, paradoxically, it has a greater chance of occurring, effectively and abundantly, in quantum leaps, amid existential revolutions.
Smile to the Heavens, which sent you a difficult situation, as a challenge to your cleverness, intelligence, maturity, and good sense. And before the stalemate, ask yourself, with an open mind and heart: Lord, what do you want to teach me or suggest to me through this pain?
By doing so, you will easily create psychological patterns that will allow you to notice how life is rich with opportunities to grow and be happy, as we have so much to thank and so little to complain about when we already have enough lucidity to know that we are responsible for everything bad or good that happens in our lives.
Be happy and do not give up, especially if you are going through a hard time – hard times are key-moments of openness, transcendence and victory, even if everything seems to point just the opposite way.
Spirit Gustavo Henrique
Medium: Benjamin Teixeira de Aguiar
December 21, 2000