The journey ends here. Or maybe it begins !

It’s now been almost a month post graduated and I know that I am almost late by these many days to make this blog post but nevertheless here it goes…

How do I sum up all the years I spent in college? How can one begin to describe a journey which seemed oh-college-then-job-sort-of-cliched yet never failed to create a new perspective with every passing year? How can one possibly able to do justice to all those memories lived, just by writing one blog post? I would dare not. Hence nothing of this is about college. He he.

Two more months and everyone will get busy with their own jobs, own careers, own lives. Sure everyone would promise to stay in touch but let’s be honest here, we all know how that would turn out to be. You want a quick proof? Just count the number of school friends that you are in touch with now? This is just another phase which gets repeated every year, only with different people. We are growing up. We are getting ready to face the world outside the door. We are becoming one of them. We are trying our shoelaces to go out there and find ourselves in the crowd. The sea of anonymity outside our doors is waiting to swallow few thousands of us. And we are trying to sail our boats. Towards the future. We haven’t seen the future yet but will it stop us from sailing? No.

Some will survive. Rest will become particles. Particles which will ultimately reach the shore; not sooner, later. But isn’t the race all about to reach there faster? To earn more? To spend more? To become the king of our own little kingdom?

And then one fine morning, when you wake up from your slumber, you realize you’ve never actually slept. The years have gone by in front of your eyes, and you’ve let them pass. You have seen them passing and you remember every year, every month, every day, every minute and every second, passing in front of your eyes; eyes which were wide open, dreaming about something which never existed in the first place. You keep telling yourself lies until they become an integral part of you. You become the part of the world which you’ve created for yourself, and the funny thing is, you feel suffocated. In your own goddamn world. The reality acts as an oxygen mask, and no matter how much you hate it, you can never dare to remove it.

You actually start seeing the pattern, you start predicting things, and you predict them correctly nine out of ten times. And you know why you fail the tenth time? Because a small part of you still expect things to be how you want them to be. And when this tenth time gets repeated a thousand times, you realize the randomness. You start being one of them. You stop being you, you become them. You become a particle. You become the randomness.

You realize how life has been fucking up your plans since forever. Sometimes it’s suffocating, sometimes it’s hysterical and the rest of the times it’s just plain nothing. The depth in which your choices echo till you scream your lungs out. An infinite in which you are falling relentlessly, opposing every force of this universe. A life which is a rock bottom in itself, and it keeps hitting you, till you feel numb.

When everyone around you has defined the term success in their own way and are constantly rating you on their petty scales. When your family starts worrying about your decisions that you haven’t taken yet. Then, my friend, you start realizing how the society has managed to win. Maybe for a brief period of time. But it has won. And it will keep winning till you stop this race. Till you stop thinking if you are reaching the shore faster or slower. Till you stop thinking if you are earning more or less. Till you start focusing only on things that matter, that you want to pursue.

Giving up is the only sure way to fail.

It seems that failure tends to be more public than success. Or at least that’s what we perceive it to be. We fret it, we try to avoid it, and we question ourselves every time we have unconventional ideas. But the simple truth is – no great success was ever achieved without failure. It may be one epic failure. Or a series of failures – such as Edison’s 10,000 attempts to create a light bulb. But, whether we like it or not, failure is a necessary stepping stone to achieving our dreams.

Today I wanted to share this collection of 30 quotes that will hopefully inspire you to look at failure differently.

1. “Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be” – John Wooden

2. “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” – Jack Canfield

3. “Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.” – Coco Chanel

4. “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” – Robert F. Kennedy

5. “The phoenix must burn to emerge.” – Janet Fitch

6. “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” – Ken Robinson

7. “Giving up is the only sure way to fail.” – Gena Showalter

8. “If you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want” – Richard Yates

9. “Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” – Denis Waitley

10. “When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important.” – Ellen DeGeneres

11. “It’s failure that gives you the proper perspective on success.” – Ellen DeGeneres

12. “There is no failure except in no longer trying.” – Chris Bradford

13. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas A. Edison

14. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill

15. “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” – Paulo Coelho

16. “Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.” – Lance Armstrong

17. “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill

18. “I’d rather be partly great than entirely useless.” – Neal Shusterman

19. “We are all failures – at least the best of us are.” – J.M. Barrie

20. “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” – Henry Ford

21. “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” – C.S. Lewis

22. “Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.” – Robert T. Kiyosaki

23. “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” – Napoleon Hill

24. “You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.” – Johnny Cash

25. “It’s not how far you fall, but how high you bounce that counts.” – Zig Ziglar

26. “Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I’ve met people who don’t want to try for fear of failing.” – J.K. Rowling

27. “No human ever became interesting by not failing. The more you fail and recover and improve, the better you are as a person. Ever meet someone who’s always had everything work out for them with zero struggle? They usually have the depth of a puddle. Or they don’t exist.” – Chris Hardwick

28. “When we give ourselves permission to fail, we, at the same time, give ourselves permission to excel.” – Eloise Ristad

29. “With a hint of good judgment, to fear nothing, not failure or suffering or even death, indicates that you value life the most. You live to the extreme; you push limits; you spend your time building legacies. Those do not die.” – Criss Jami

30. “What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?” – John Green

I am NOT my Past :)

We are often let down by the most trusted people and loved by the most unexpected ones. Some make us cry for things that we haven’t done, while others ignore our faults and just see our smile. Some leave us when we need them the most, while some stay with us even when ask them to leave. The world is a mixture of people. We just need to know which hand to shake and which hand to hold! After all that’s life, learning to hold on and learning to let go.

There will be times where you’re challenged, where nothing seems to be going right, where tragedy strikes and you’re left to pick up the pieces. These experiences leave us feeling weak and hopeless. But that’s no reason to stay down for long. No matter what you’re going through in life, other people just like you have gone through the same or worse and come out stronger on the other side. It’s times like these you need to be strong and never give up.

I’ve been walked on, used and forgotten and I don’t regret one moment of it, because in those moments I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned who I can trust and can’t. I’ve learned the meaning of friendship. I’ve learned how to tell when people are lying and when they’re sincere. I’ve learned how to be myself, and appreciate the truly great people in my life as they arrive.

I do not define myself by how many roadblocks have appeared in my path. I define myself by the courage I’ve found to forge new roads. I do not define myself by how many disappointments I’ve faced. I define myself by the forgiveness and the faith I have found to begin again. I do not define myself by how long a relationship lasted. I define myself by how much I have loved, and been willing to love again. I do not define myself by how many times I have been knocked down. I define myself by how many times I have struggled to my feet. I am not my pain. I am not my past. I am that which has emerged from the fire.