“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” – Confucius

At some point in your life I’m sure you’ve thought to yourself, “I’ll forgive you, but I will never forget”, sounds familiar right?

It only makes sense to use that logic for self-preservation. We want to protect ourselves. But does it really make sense? The meaning of forgiveness literally means to grant pardon for, or remission of, or to absolve – meaning to free from guilt or blame or their consequences. 

Naturally we overemphasize mistakes. We put so much focus on failing that it literally becomes an expectation, and once we have that expectation, we begin to make excuses for it. Eventually we get so wrapped up in excuses and expecting to fail that we do just that – we fail.

When we find ourselves in that failure we don’t learn, we don’t recover, and we don’t rise up, because we have allowed ourselves to think that it is excusable. More often then not we defeat ourselves. We beat ourselves up, set unrealistic goals, and chide ourselves when we can’t do the impossible.

In some ways it plays along the lines of the concept that our greatest strengths are also our greatest weakness’s. Things happen and mistakes are made, but we are the ones who are responsible for failures, because we decide whether we are going to learn from our mistakes, or wallow in self-pity.

Our mind is like a piece of paper. We write things on it, draw on it, scribble, doodle, and sometimes put in hours of work creating a master piece. But every now and then we mess up. We go back and we try to erase it, but no matter how hard we erase, the lines are still there. They are etched into the paper for forever.

Some people try and throw it away and start over. They wad up the paper, full of good drawings and bad drawings, and they throw it away like it never existed. Other people draw over the lines as best they can, and continue working on their masterpiece, leaving the lines as reminders of what once was. In that instance those lines are memories, they remind us not to make the same mistake twice, and show us what we did wrong before. We can’t always start over, and the more we try to the more we lose ourselves.

The mistakes that are meant for us to learn from we try and hide. We do everything in our power to cover them up and act like they never happened. And when we do that, we are developing a habit that will lead us to make the same mistake, over and over and over again.

Wadding up the paper and starting over seems like such a good idea, but when we consider that we are throwing out all of the good memories with the bad, it should make us look at it a little bit differently. Life isn’t about starting over, it isn’t about being perfect. Life is about second chances, and trying again and again until we finally succeed.