The Yardsticks of Life - Success and Failure

Life is not a thing that can be measured or weighed. But we often try to evaluate it in terms of success and failure. It is the basic human nature that we try to estimate our profit and loss in each and everything we do. We often try to divide life into two watertight compartments of success and failure. But that is not to be. Life is not presented to us in definite shades of black and white, rather we have varying shades of grey.

Although we can separately define success and failure, yet we cannot draw a line between the two. They are often overlapping or at times one may replace the other. Sometimes we lose even if we have won. At other times, even being a loser we might turn to be a winner in the end.

On some occasions it happens that when we win, there's a sense of guilt lurking in some corner of our heart, which keeps our success incomplete - we means we fail inspite of the success. Sometimes we fail to keep our relationships intact - at that particular moment we succeeded as a businessman but failed badly in being a human being. We fail to justify our existence as a man at the cost of feelings of others.

Basically success and failure co-exist. The victory of one person is to be attributed to the defeat of the person in opposition. If we study these two terms from the point of view of the sportspersons we can say that - no matter how successful a person might be in any sport, if he doesn't retire at the right time, when he is at the peak, very soon the journey downhill begins - this might turn his success into a failure (failure in terms of his decreasing popularity, people might remember him for his failures in the last matches). This is only another aspect of success and failure.

In general, we often hear people remark about a wealthy person, "He is a very successful man". Can we define success in monetary terms? Definitely not. Just before Alexander, the Great breathed his last, he had asked that his hands be kept out of his grave so that people might realise that he too went away empty-handed from this world.

The sooner we absorb this message in our lives the better it is. Otherwise we too will have to lament like Hamlet: "Had I but time, O! I could tell you, but let it be". The time once past cannot be recalled and reshaped, so the time to act is here and now.

Omar Khayyam writes:

"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it"