Redefining failure...

There's a phrase NASA used in reference to the Apollo 13 mission: "Failure is not an option." When I saw this bold statement on a sticker in the Kennedy Space Center gift shop, I wanted it. Not just the sticker, but the statement. I wanted to exemplify it.

All my life I've defined failure as not performing 100 percent. But that is wrong. If we performed everything in our lives 100% perfectly, our lives would suck, to put it bluntly. You wouldn't be challenged; calculus and physics would be a breeze. You'd be married to your first boyfriend, never having had a chance to date different people, because the first relationship would have gone perfectly. Everyone would do their jobs perfectly, leaving no room for moving up or down. There'd be no fights; there'd be no competition; there'd be no passion.

No. Failure is not trying, not giving it your best shot, resigning when the result looks different than that which you expected. There's a line in a Ben Folds Five song called Regrets that goes...

"I thought about the hours wasted watching tv, drinking beer. I thought about the things I thought about until immobilized with fear. And all the great ideas I had. And how we just made fun of those who had the guts to try and failed and then I ended up in jail."

Failure for NASA was not the fact that the Apollo 13 spacecraft malfunctioned. It was not the fact that the mission never reached the moon, as intended. Failure to them equaled not doing their best to get those men home safely. And, they certainly did not fail at that. Failure in my case would be not following the drive inside that pushes me to write and take pictures. It would be giving in to the fear that no one will like what I have to say or care, including myself. It would be to remain within my comfort zone. President Kennedy, whom the Space Center is named after, once said:

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."



Not because it is easy, but because it is hard. The beauty of these words astounds me. With hardness comes challenges, with challenges- success, with success- beauty. In the search for beauty, failure is not an option.