The greatest mistake physicians make is that they attempt to cure the body without attempting to cure the mind, yet the mind and the body are one and should not be treated separately!
Never mind failures; they are quite natural, they are the beauty of life, these failures. What would life be without them? It would not be worth having if it were not for struggles. Where would be the poetry of life? Never mind the struggles, the mistakes. I never heard a cow tell a lie, but it is only a cow-never a man. So never mind these failures, these little backslidings; hold the ideal a thousand times, and if you fail a thousand times, make the attempt once more.
A good coach encourages the same type of resilience in the people they work with. They encourage them to take risks. If the risk results in failure, they help all people to learn from the mistake and then go on to try another way.
All this struggling and striving to make the world better is a great mistake. Not that it's wrong to try to improve the world if you know how but simply because struggling and striving are the worst possible ways to go about doing anything!
I made one great mistake in my life-when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made but there was some justification-the danger that the Germans would make them.
To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully. It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life. Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.
A good coach encourages the same type of resilience in the people they work with. They encourage them to take risks. If the risk results in failure, they help all people to learn from the mistake and then go on to try another way.
Yes, and even for the past...that it will turn out to have been all right for what it was. Something I can accept. Mistakes made by the self I had to be or was not able to be.