#222 DISAPPOINTMENT

Have you ever had one of those days?  Elvis used to ask that in a song, “Have you ever had one of those days boys, have you ever had one of those days?  When nothing goes right from morning til night, have you ever had one of those days?" Have you ever gotten up in the morning and thought about all the things you wanted to accomplish that day?  You had everything outlined, everything planned so that you knew exactly what you wanted to accomplish.  Then after a frustrating day, you look back at the end of it at all the things you hadn't gotten done.

You call that disappointment.  Disappointment means not as appointed, or not as planned.  It takes a lot of forms.  For one person it might be a picnic that is rained out; for another it may have been he expected his son to mow the lawn that day and the rain came and disappointed him -- the lawn is still overgrown.  When things don't go as we planned them to go, we're disappointed and sometimes those things are big things, aren't they?  Whether or not he lawn gets mowed is little; whether or not a picnic gets rained out is really little; but a job isn't.  What your children actually become isn't a little thing.  It's the big disappointments that really seem to reach down at the roots of our lives and rip them apart.

In facing life you've got to be able to handle the failures so that you can have more successes.  You can't really appreciate the mountaintops without first walking through the valleys.  A man named Wilfred Peterson said, "He who hopes to avoid all failure and misfortune is trying to live in a fair land.  The wise man realistically accepts failures as a part of life and builds a philosophy to meet them and make the most of them." It makes sense.  Failures are a part of life, we ought to be ready to meet them, make the most of them, overcome them and then be successful.  I guess our problem though is that many of us haven't learned to live so that failure can be accepted as a part of life.  We see only the glamour of success, it sticks out like a neon light.  It is so bright that when an occasional failure does along our way we act like our world has caved in. 

More of us have our days all planned out so much that we get upset when anyone stands in the way of our plans.  Ask any airline ticket agent how most passengers act when their schedules are interfered with.  If things don't go as we planned, we are disappointed; sometimes we take it out on somebody else.  Here are some suggestions for helping you take control of yourself when you are disappointed. 

First, when your plans are detoured, take a look at what's happened.  Recognize that life has a cruel way of knocking everyone down now and then.  But when it knocks you down, get up and brush yourself off.  I like what Mark Twain said once, he said, "A few fly bites can't stop a spirited horse."

Second, learn a lesson from what happened.  One scientist said, "At best research is about 99% failure, and 1% success." And then he said, "And the 1% is the only thing that counts." You know if you don't learn from your mistakes, you'll never have success, you'll always be disappointed.