Words to remember in the New Year

From this piece by Umair Haque in, of all places, The Harvard Business Review:

…So consider this: when you fail, and fail big — forgive. Forgive the people around you. Forgive yourself. Examine the past, but don’t let it imprison you. You can dwell on your failure for years, and turn a trauma into a crisis. Or you can gently remember that mistakes aren’t the end of the world, but the beginning of wisdom — and firmly step forward into possibility.

As the great poet Antonio Machado once wrote: “walker, there is no path; the path is made by walking.” Never was this truer than in an era of abject institutional failure, social fracture, and economic meltdown. We know where yesterday’s paths lead — not to a shining city we once called prosperity, but to here; dying metropolises, battered exurbs, mass unemployment, nail-biting fear of the future, plutocracy and protest, the crumbling ruins of empire. So map the horizons of your own journey, and, when the status quo tells you it can’t be done, tell the status quo to go to hell.

Yes. This. A thousand times over.

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