- Failure isn’t the end of the world
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same…
—Rudyard Kipling, “If”
Life is all about making a comeback. In Greek mythology, a phoenix rises from its own ashes. People are written off. Adversaries consider their opponents destroyed totally and unable to re-emerge. But then, a ray of hope shines. Clinging to it, they bounce back. Life is indeed a struggle. Every day there are new challenges. Sometimes, we live up to them. Sometimes, we don’t. The pendulum of life swings from one extreme to another. Sometimes our dreams come true. At others, they go sour. Just when we are least prepared, life throws challenges. Just when we are hard put to find a solution, a simple way out dawns. Just when we are groping in the dark, we stumble upon hope. Such is the mystery of life.
Following defeat in the 2016 US presidential election, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democrat presidential candidate, was bruised, battered, but not shattered. She suffered bouts of depression. However, she fought back. She did not let the defeat subdue her. Rather, she took it in her stride. She wrote a candid memoir, What Happened, just a year after. In the author’s note, she summarises her memoir thus: “It’s the story of what led me to this crossroads of American history and how I kept going after a shocking defeat; how I reconnected with the things that matter most to me and began to look ahead with hope, instead of backward with regret”.
The late Richard Nixon was forced out of the presidency thanks to the Watergate scandal in 1974. At that time, political pundits and the newspapers’ columnists wrote obituaries of his political life; that he had earned so much infamy that he would be relegated to a mere footnote in history and would not get out of the long shadow cast over his political career by the Watergate scandal. Inarguably, the scandal in question had dealt a crushing blow to his credibility and reputation. It turned out to be the proverbial case of bigger they are, the harder they fall. However, he proved all naysayers wrong in the long run. Quite a recent book, After The Fall: The Remarkable Comeback of Richard Nixon” by Kasey S Pipes, a former advisor to President George W Bush and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, notes that post-presidency, Nixon advised Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H W Bush and Bill Clinton on foreign policy. In so doing, he “established new relationships with policymakers, politicians, and the public”. It begs the question: how did he stage a “remarkable comeback”, after four years of leading a crisis-filled life (failing health, financial problems, his wife suffering a stroke)? On his 65th birthday, he made up his mind to make a new beginning. The book quotes him: “I had to decide what to do with the rest of my life. In a sense, this was a life-or-death decision. If a person quits after a defeat, he dies spiritually and will soon die physically.”
Success chains our creativity. Failure opens new doors to us, leading us to think out of the box. It makes us mull over the whole defeat process, making us learn new lessons. No doubt, it’s quite hard and sometimes unbearable to experience a defeat. But Allah has His own plans for us
He chose the subject close to his heart: foreign policy. And then the world saw him slowly and gradually rising to prominence yet another time. As the book says: “He wrote nine books, dozens of articles, and gave countless speeches in an attempt to influence foreign policy.”
Steve Jobs, the revolutionary entrepreneur, who had put so much into co-building the Apple empire, was turfed out as CEO by his company’s directors at the young age of 30. His years of struggle and hard work went down the drain before his very eyes. He suffered: disbelief, despair, grief, shock and ultimately, he plunged headlong into depression.
He had to let go of the past. It was all grist to his mill. He built a new company “NeXT”. Then 12 years after his ouster, Apple’s shares started plummeting. The board of directors thought it advisable to appoint Jobs CEO. He accepted. And then the world witnessed Apple booming worldwide, with Jobs introducing iPhone, iPod, iPad, and MacBook. Apple as a company made massive profits, accumulating huge wealth. Had Steve Jobs not been thrown out of Apple, would he have come up with revolutionary technologies?
He said in retrospect: “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life”.
To draw the strands of the whole discussion together, life is all about making a comeback. To meet failure and to taste the bitterness of a defeat is not the end of the world. Success chains our creativity. Failure opens new doors to us, leading us to think out of the box. It makes us mull over the whole defeat process, making us learn new lessons. No doubt, it’s quite hard and sometimes unbearable to experience a defeat. But Allah has His own plans for us. At the time of being defeated, we don’t have a crystal ball to gaze into. Therefore, we often wallow in self-pity and fall into depression. But that makes us compassionate too. We can then feel how others think when they are knocked down by failures. Life is uncertain. Uncertainty makes us push forward and strive harder. In coming to terms with reality and making peace with our past, lies our salvation. We waste too much time regretting little things and carrying past baggage. Rises and falls, ups and downs, all are part and parcel of life. Life is all about making a new beginning. One may quote Allama Muhammad Iqbal with advantage to drive one’s point home:
Jhapatna, Palatna, Palat Kar Jhapatna
Lahoo Garam Rakhne Ka Hai Ek Bahana
—(Bal-e-Jibril) Shaheen
Again, in Shikwa, Iqbal says:
Kyun Ziyaan Kaar Banun, Sood Framosh Rahun
Fikr-e-Farda Na Karum, Mahw-e-Ghum-e-Dosh Rahu
