I BASHED MY MUM’S CAR

One of the things my driving instructor told me was that no matter how hard I tried, I would still bash someone’s car. At the point I didn’t believe him because I fancied myself a very careful person, so I believed that except someone ran into me, I couldn’t make a mistake.

I was wrong obviously, and I ended up bashing my mum’s car not once but twice, two times I ended up stepping on the accelerator when I attempted to step on the break. The hardest part of it was how I did it the second time, I thought I had learnt my mistake but apparently I hadn’t. I believed so much in my carefulness that I didn’t expect to make the same mistake TWICE.

The reality is that’s exactly how life is, we think that by planning, working hard, having a positive mindset and attitude and doing everything right, life will definitely work out for us, with a large amount of motivational speakers feeding us the same garbage, we begin to genuinely believe it only to fall into a pool of emotional trauma when things go south.

We try to imagine that we have a form of control over how life turns out, but the truth is that we don’t and we never will. No matter hard we try, no matter how careful we are, we are bound to make mistakes, some minute, and some massive, but it is for certain that we are going to make those mistakes and sometimes, not once but twice, thrice and as many times as possible.

I was angry at myself the second time, at first I was angry at myself for even driving the car at all, then I realized that I couldn’t be angry at myself for doing something that I was trained for, I could only be angry at myself for failing at it.

After a failure, we have a choice to make, we could stay down and stop tying entirely, we could just live life and let life happen to us, or we could get up knowing that we could fail over and over and over again, at the end of the day it’s our choice.

Choosing to go on after a defeat or series of defeats could be the hardest thing to do and worse of all isn’t even a guarantee of success, but it’s a guarantee that we are going to keep trying and maybe, just maybe if we keep going, we may finally reach the destination we’ve been searching for.