Editorial

The Merriam Webster Dictionary says to be lost is to be “taken away or beyond reach or attainment…. unable to find the way… obscured or overlooked during a process or activity.”

In every sense of the word, I am lost just like so many of my fellow students.

The future is incredibly scary and I don’t know what I’m wearing tomorrow, let alone what next year has in store. There isn’t a map or step-by-step recipe laid out before me.

Everything is unknown, everything is subject to change, and everything is terribly scary.

Many friends and fellow classmates are graduating. They are going out and taking on the world and they are terrified.

What makes it so scary is that there is the high possibility of failure.

There is so much pressure on getting out in less than four years, getting the internship, getting the job, getting the house with the fence and the dog, the matching four door sedans and two kids.

What is the deal?

What is the rush? Why does everything have to go according to plan?

We are too afraid to acknowledge that it is entirely OK to fail. And sometimes failure brings about an even better outcome than absolute success.

Penicillin was accidentally discovered when Alexander Fleming was a slob and left a dirty petri dish from a meaningless experiment in a lab sink before going on vacation. J.K. Rowling’s original Harry Potter manuscript was rejected 12 times before she was finally published.

Failure teaches us. It humbles us. It makes us look at situations we are in and take opportunities that we may have never thought of.

Failure is just as important in our lives as success.

It’s OK to not have every last second of your life planned out. It’s OK to drop everything and go backpacking across Europe. It’s OK to not get your dream job and have to move home for a few months while you look at other options.

Maybe you have everything planned out, life is your oyster and everything is perfect. Maybe you don’t.

We stand together while looking at the future and you have just as much of an idea of what is going to happen as I do, which is nothing.

I could win a $100 million and you could lose your job. I could live out of a cardboard box for the remainder of my life, and you could be sipping margaritas on a beach somewhere.

All that really matters is that we are trying and that we make our lives matter through the memories we share.

Yes the world is scary. Yes I will stand with you, while we are scared together. Yes, we could fail, but it will be a beautiful failure.

 

Samantha Bradley

Editor-in-Chief

sbrad414@uwsp.edu

 

 

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