Dig To The Bottom

Dear lovely people,

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. Says Johnny Cash

A shock of my life awaited me when I met Jeremiah that evening. I met a completely calm man, relaxed and with eyes closed, enjoying the music he was producing from his flute.  I waited patiently to the end of the song and when he opened his eyes, I saw an authentic smile light up his face to portray the joyous Jeremiah I have always known. After all the formalities, I was burning with desire to find out what his magic was, I wanted to understand what kept him going after all the dilemmas he had repeatedly been through.

Jeremiah’s ordeals started some ten years back when his flourishing grocery store was burned down to ashes caused by a nearby gas station that exploded. Jeremiah was not discouraged but later on started a bakery business. Thieves attacked the bakery one weekend and made away with over ten thousand dollars. The business suffered tremendously and finally was closed down. Jeremiah still not discouraged, sold lots of his property to start a car import business. He was setup by his adversaries – people he took for friends. They paid him to ship in three pickup trucks. Unknown to Jeremiah, the trucks were loaded with contraband goods including drugs. His goods were impounded, he was charged to court and imprisoned for five years. Once liberated after serving the jail term, Jeremiah was still beaming with energy, he restarted from scratch to build a textile distribution business that flourished. Again his shop and warehouse, caught fire a few weeks back while he was on a business trip and everything was burned to ashes.

I was wondering how to console him on my way to his house but seated in front of him, I realized he could rather console me. Jeremiah was completely at peace, relaxed and enjoying his instrument. I asked him what the magic was, how he managed all the times to be at peace despite the terrible things happening in his life. Jeremiah smiled and told me some startling truths about the way he approaches life and business.

“I am not surprised that you are surprised to see me feeling alright” he started. “You know, the first need for somebody like me going through major failures is to rewrite what I called the standard script. You need a plausible explanation for the failure that includes danger signs you missed, mistakes you made, and/or shortcomings you possess that contributed to the failure and may have caused it. The truth is, it takes time to finish such a rewrite, and it's painful to do. You need time and support. I have had that from my family and close friends like you so I pick up.”

“Most of the times, you just need to create a plausible explanation that is even painful to write, and you need to get over intense negative emotions that can consume your life and propel you to self-destructive acts like quitting altogether. That is how I have managed all of what I have been through.”

Jeremiah made me to clearly understand that what has happened, has happened, there is nothing you can do about it other than understanding what happened, learning from it and moving on. No Miner who is convinced there is gold at the bottom of a mine will abandon digging along the line. They endure all the pain and dig through the hardest rocks to get to the bottom where they find what they truly want – the gold.

Walter Anderson puts it beautifully when he says “Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself.”