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Today's
quotation:
You may encounter many defeats, but you must not
be defeated. In
fact, it may be necessary to encounter
the defeats, so you
can know who you are, what you
can rise from, how you can
still come out of it.
Maya Angelou
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Today's
Meditation:
Not
every experience in life can be a
"victory." We can't get all the
promotions, new jobs, winning seasons, personal records,
or small achievements that we strive for. And that's
more than okay--it's important to us to have setbacks
sometimes. If other people imply that a defeat is
reflective of who we are as people, then those others are
simply wrong. And isn't that what we fear about
defeats--the way that others will see us for having been
defeated?
But
the true reflection of who we are--or who we are
becoming--is seen in the ways in which we deal with those
defeats, not in the defeats themselves. If we allow
them to keep us down, then that's something of our own
doing. If we learn from them and move on and put our
energy and effort into something new and different, then
we're taking something from the situation and learning
from it, allowing it to be a teacher rather than a source
of discouragement.
The
greatest lessons in my life have come through what other
people might have called failures or defeats. In
fact, I often saw them that way myself until enough time
had passed for me to understand what I had gained from
them. Now that I see their value, I'm thankful for
the defeats, and I'm also grateful that I didn't allow
other people's opinions to determine how I felt about
myself or my actions.
There
will be more defeats in my life. I've sent tons of
letters to agents and publishers, but no one is
representing or publishing my novels. Every time I
make up a new packet to send to an agent, I realize that
I'm probably going to be looking at a new defeat, but
that's okay--I still make up the packets and send
them. If I don't, I let my defeats of the past
determine my actions of the present--and that's not fair
to me, now is it?
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