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About This Author
My name is Joy, and I love to write.
Why poetry, here? Because poetry uplifts its writer, and if she is lucky enough, her readers, too. Around us, so many objects abound to write about. Once a poet starts with a smallest, most trivial object, he shall discover that his pen will spill out what is most delicate or most majestic hidden inside him. Since the classics sometimes dealt with lofty subjects with a lofty language, a person with poetry in his soul may incline to emulate that. That is understandable. Poetry does that to a person: it enlarges the soul and gives it wings. Yet, to really soar, a poet needs to take off from the ground.
 
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Everyday Canvas #862695 added October 12, 2015 at 2:05pm
Restrictions: None
Fear of Failure
Prompt: Where do you think fear of failure comes from? Was there ever something that you had feared you’d fail at but didn’t?
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I think the fear of failure comes from the vision of the desired outcome and from surmising that one doesn’t have the necessary means or circumstances to make that outcome a reality.
Once a person realizes that such a vision is just that, a vision, and an imaginary one at that, he doesn’t mind failure all that much. If anything, he may see failure in more positive terms: as a trial run or a test result. If science and scientists have made progress to change the world through failure, why can’t anyone else, also? Thinking of failure as a test result helps, for test results always bring success closer.
Yet, that fear is always there, isn’t it? It is something boiling in us, which most of the time, we cannot help.
Did I have a fear of failure ever? Surely, I did. Tons of it. Most of it, however, proved out to be false. Through it all, a Montaigne quote helped me immensely. Since I couldn’t find the exact quote now, I’ll re-word it as: The worst disasters that happened to me are the ones that I imagined/feared.
The essence of this quote saw me through many a dilemma in my life. To start with, the one huge fear I had was of marriage, based on the disaster that my parents had and the prattles and rants of the women my mother had made friends with. Still, I took the plunge and have been married quite successfully for 49 years to turn 50 in January.
It has been decades since I read Montaigne's essays, and out of that book, the idea behind this little quote stuck out among the many other impressive ones. Who says quotes are just quotes? Some of them can be lifesavers.
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