The Perfect Rose

You stop to admire a rose in full bloom, glowing with the colors of the sunset. You bury your nose in the blossom and inhale the rich scent. As you pull your face back you notice that one of the petals on this glorious rose is bent and bruised, that the rose is not, after all, perfect. Do you enjoy the rose any less for its flaw?

How do you move past flaws to find the glory in your day?

All Fall Down

“Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!” Remember when falling down was fun? Of course, literal falling gets more dangerous as our bodies age, but as we get older we also seem to get more cautious about metaphorical kinds of falling. We don’t want to be seen as messing up; we worry that we will be perceived as failures. But some of the world’s great discoveries have come from the creative handling of mistakes—graceful ways of getting up after falling down.

How can you turn a mistake or failure into something that is simply part of the game?