Failure

I've been reading this little thought book on raising a child with a disability. Here is one excerpt that I found useful in everyday life.

In baseball, the very bet hitters only get three hits every ten times at bat. And guess who has the all-time strike-out record? Babe Ruth -- Melba Colgrove, Harold Bloomfield, and Peter McWilliams

...We accept the first-ever invitation to a classmate's hose for our kindergartner, and she is brought home early because she messed her pants. We enroll our son in a summer school art class but the teacher says we can't stay in the class after he paints another kid's shirt. We take our daughter, who wears a protective helmet, out to dinner and are seated at a table in the back next to the kitchen...

There's a lot of failure to be experienced as we work to find and make places for our children in the everyday world. And it hurts. It's frustrating, maddening, painful. The bad feelings are powerful enough to make us uestion our belief that our child can attend a certain function or handle a new responsibility, or our expectations that others can accept and accommodate him. These failures are painful enough to make us say: Forget that. No way. Too hard. Hurts too much.

The negative experiences are not definitive. They are not proof that we should not bat. Each one is just a swing and a miss. Even if it's a strike-out, it's not the whole story. It is true that we must experience some successes if we are going to keep on trying things for our children. Sooner or later we have got to get a hit or, yes, we will quit bating. But we might not get one right away. We might not get one for quite a while. We are going to miss. We are going to strike out. We are going to have slumps, but we will never get a hit if we don't get up to bat.

Even in the face of early failure, let me have the faith to keep swinging.
---Barbara Gill, Changed by a Child

Today, this is what I needed to hear. It applies to so many areas in life. There are many things that I've never done before, or that I may have done and failed at. If I don't get up and try again, I will never be able to succeed at it.