Count Your Blessings, Day 15

Potholes

I am thankful for potholes.

Ok, maybe not something you were thinking you could be thankful for, but let me explain...

(No, no. That will take to long, let me summarize)

One thing in life I can assure you of is this:

You will fail.

And those failures...

Those failures will become potholes in the road you travel called life.

As for me, I have failed countless times. I have attempted many things that I have not accomplished. I have gone in a direction to only find out that it was the wrong direction well into the journey. I have reached the peak of a mountain, only to realize I was on the wrong summit. Worse yet, I let a pothole become a grave, a place where I stayed way too long, and it almost killed me.

And yet, those potholes, although they are a part of me and help define me as I am today, in no way make me or reflect the fact that I am a failure, even though that's sometimes how I look at myself.

You see, the problem isn't in the pothole, but what I do with that pothole.

Will I ignore it? Will I wallow in it? Will I try to cover it up so no one knows where I failed?

Or will I learn from them? Will I try again a different way? Will I share it with people so they don't make the same mistakes?

It's been a hard lesson to learn, in a way, it is the biggest pothole I have ever had. Learning that, even though my potholes may help define me, they do not make me a failure. Instead, I have learned to make them the markers of where I've made mistakes, they have become the milestones of where I learned hard lessons, and they have become the moments I share with others to help them avoid the same problems.

So, today, I am thankful for my failures, my potholes.

Because...

I am who I am today, not in spite of my potholes, but because of them.

And I kind of like me the way I am.