As part of my New Year and dealing with my depression and keeping a healthy focus in my life, I have been reading a book, Achieve Anything in Just One Year by Jason Harvey. Every day, there is a quotation, a short reading and an assignment to work on. I try to do this every day, but there have been some assignments that were hard, and so they were put off to give them the consideration that they deserved.

The last few days have been related to failure and how to change your present habits and deal with failure better since failure is the foundation, the stepping stones to success.

Today’s assignment asks the reader to take our failure and fall forward.

I have a friend who will take my ‘failure’ (although he would never call it that) and gives me a poke, just enough to propel me forward, and that is one of the things that this assignment reminded me of. For this assignment, though, the point is to give myself that little poke, on my own, not relying on my friend, and take whatever the failure is and fall forward to the next level.

Immediately, as I began to write my response, I was thinking of Wales, and since that it is my spiritual place, the place that reminds me of what I can do and the strong feelings that it can evoke in me, I thought this was a good reflection both for falling forward from failure and the faith that I’m trying to see more of and work on recognizing during this Lent.

One of the things the writer asked me to remember were those moments in childhood when we’re learning to ride a bicycle and flew down that hill with abandon.

My problem is I never flew down that hill with abandon. The closest I came to anything like that was Wales. I let go of my fears in Wales because it was Wales and because I had no choice.

If I didn’t drive, I didn’t go home.

If I didn’t climb as close as I could to Dolwyddelan, I would have missed the one thing that I’d wanted for so long – Llywelyn’s castle; his birthplace.

If I didn’t push down my fear, I would have regretted it.

As it stands now, while there are things that I didn’t do while I was there, but there are so many more that I did and it’s the first time in my life that I had absolutely NO REGRETS.

I need to remember this.