Two things are certain in life: failure and death. Unless the world is coming to an end or the Lord Almighty takes you up to heaven, at one point or another you will die. Without claiming to be a perfect person, failure will always find you. If neither of these is avoidable, then why do they cause such fear?
Obviously, I have not personally experienced death yet and, to be honest, this is not a fear of mine. On the other hand, failure is something that I have been through multiple times. Being a natural competitor makes failure one of the harder things in life to swallow. Throughout high school, this is what I have found to be my greatest fear: fear of failure.
Even though, so far, all of this sounds depressing, high school has been the best part of my life. Reflecting on the past four years, I look back and see how much I have grown personally and how much the relationships around me have grown. As I look back now, I try to see what it was that made me the person I am today, and I realize something. I have not grown in character because I have surrounded myself with older and wiser people. I have not matured because life has been easy. I did not learn anything from being successful. Everything I know today is from some failure in the past.
Being an athlete at a small private school, success is often hard to come by, and failure occurs many times in one season. Football has been the perfect example of failure for me. Throughout the entire season our team won only one game. Halfway through the season we were told that our leader had abandoned us.
After that, football was not a game anymore; it was a fight. I can honestly say those weeks were the most challenging weeks in high school. I was given the option to quit the team and forfeit the rest of the season. Now that I can look back on the season with a different perspective, I am extremely relieved that I kept on playing.
Here failure proved to be a much more complex idea than I originally had understood. We continued in the season, losing each and every game we played. As the season came to an end, I realized we were not fighting to win; instead, we were fighting to finish. There was a sense of accomplishment in just finishing. So many doubted that we would ever complete the season, and we did. The memories I made on the field with my friends I will never forget, and I have no regrets in finishing the season.
Also at this time I had the opportunity to join The Feather staff. However, being an athlete does not leave me with loads of spare time to pick up hard electives. God gifted me with an athletic ability, but writing is definitely not one of my hidden talents. As time went on, my friends got the best of me and convinced me to join.
Now, this experience was far from anything like football. The only similarity is the fear of failure that lingered with me during the first few months of the class. There were other things that were also intimidating about the class. One is that most of the people on The Feather staff are smart. I am not saying that I am a complete idiot, but I was definitely one of the few athletes on staff. With that combination of fears I was very hesitant.
What I thought was going to be the worst class of my senior year ended up being one of my favorites — not because I learned to enjoy writing articles, but because of the experience that came with joining the staff. There are several people that I would not have gotten to know at all if it were not for The Feather. I learned valuable life lessons that really would have been hard to learn in other places.
One example of this would be my article with Ramandeep Singh. Adviser Greg Stobbe asked me to interview him and write an article on his father’s death. This was a very touchy subject and I was more afraid than ever. I had never had a conversation with Raman, and now I had to dive into one about his father?s recent death. In the end, Raman was the easiest-going guy I could have interviewed and, because of the experience, I call Raman one of my friends today.
Overall, I have learned that fear is one thing that holds people back, including me. Rather than let what you fear hold you back, what if you were to use it to push through obstacles? I believe that a common mistake is to suppose that people succeed through success, when often times they succeed through failure.
Evans will attend Fresno City College in the fall, with plans to transfer to Fresno Pacific University and major in Urban Ministry.
For more senior reflections, read the May 22 column, Closing this chapter, beginning another.
