Cultivating resilience and hope
I found this little nest while walking, it's in a blackthorn but too low down to be safe. It looks like this years, and perfectly made but abandoned. Whatever bird has made it has tried, picked the wrong spot, but will go on to make a better one elsewhere.
Success in life is held up to be the thing you should be looking to achieve. You're supposed to have a successful career, the lifestyle, lots of followers, be a winner. The basic fact is not everyone can be a winner, you can't win all the time, and if you do win it's unlikely you'll stay there because someone will eventually come along and knock you off.
It's a better quality to learn to lose, or fail, and not allow that to dent your enthusiasm to keep trying. I came 36th out of 60 riders in my racing league last night. I have clawed my way up to around mid pack from the bottom. When I started I couldn't hang onto the bunch at all. I'm with far better riders than me and I could easily get disillusioned I'm not as good as them, but my quality is I don't give up.
This is a quality I never realised I had until I was training for my 12 hour attempt. One of the transforming things for me was how other people saw me. Even though I wasn't as good and strong as them they saw me as someone with a huge amount of determination, someone who fought for everything. I kept screenshots of the nice things people said to me and gradually I started to turn around in my head that I wasn't failing, I was winning because I kept trying hard and didn't give up.
Some people in life are the beautiful butterflies, going effortlessly through everything. But some of us are the butterflies with tattered wings, the ones that have fought battles, the ones who keep trying to fly. Always have hope, keep trying even if you think you're no good, even if you know you're not going to win, because the resilience to keep going in the face of setbacks is a more admirable quality to have than if everything were easy. You don't necessarily have to achieve; trying, enjoying, and learning from the journey is the real prize.
