Resurrecting The Champ

     Today, sitting with my family of close to thirty people, I did a lot of thinking about my life. I thought about the direction I really want to take my life, and listened as I heard stories from my aunts and uncles about when they were young, and heard my other cousins talk about their dreams, loves, and failures I wish I could spend more time with them, they really mean a lot to me. 

     When I got back to my apartment, I wanted the movie Resurrecting The Champ. I didn't watch it alone, but had I done so, it may have made me cry. It was a very powerful story about trying to prove oneself, and dealing with failure, change, and stolen dreams. As always, I tried to connect the story to my life and way of thinking. 

     EVERYBODY lives their life trying to impress others. No one can truly say that they don't care what other's think-our world revolves around what others think. This isn't a bad thing though, my mood changes when I make my father proud; he's probably the hardest person in my life to impress and when he tells me he's proud of me, or when I know that he is, it's the best feeling in the world. 

     However disappointment is the worst. Throughout my "failures," dropping out of college three times being a few of the most prominent (and other "skeletons" in my closet among others), I have felt like, and have let people down before. Sometimes I wish I could be someone else, a champ like in the movie I watched tonight. Wouldn't everyone love to be a born success story? How good would it really feel to impress everyone, your son like in the movie, or your father, like in my life. Sometimes life throws some hard pitches, and many times you strike out. What I've learned most from failure is that the way you bounce back is the biggest lesson we as individuals will learn in our lives. Failure is only but a meaningless word, a word that should be defined is it's normal definition, but rewritten as a life lesson, or  what defines a person. 

I've got a Japanese symbol on my left arm. Sometimes I tell people it's because I was a "meat head" in high school, and it's true that I love the gym and was very too much into lifting weights my senior year of high school. However, it takes a lot of strength to overcome failure, and that is what that tattoo means to me. 

     I consider myself a failure. Sometimes I look in the mirror and ate the person staring back, yet a failure is someone who isn't afraid to take risks, who is strong and resilient, and someone always ready to learn. I'm a failure at directions, and as my family knows, I get lost A LOT. With that said, I also know a lot more territory now since I've been lost in many places (many of them the same places over and over) and now know how to get "un-lost" if I make a wrong turn there again. 

     That is an example of true failure.