Try something new! by Shelley Hopkins

Don’t let the fear of Failure Paralyze You!

            A commercial on the radio says, “I remember one Thanksgiving when my Mother tried several new recipes.  The turkey was dry, the gravy was salty, and the sweet potato pie was burned.”  The commercial ends as the speaker cheerfully says, “the good news is mom never tried a new recipe again!”

            How sad!  Sometimes what seems like a great idea in a cookbook falls flat on the table, but other times the meal is wonderful, and a new favorite is discovered.  If we never try to create a new meal, we will never enjoy a new meal.  Perhaps that is obvious, but it is still true.  We have to try new things, reach out and take risks, or we will never grow.

            Our family used to host game nights in our home, and I decided to try something new and special for my last one before moving out of state.  I cooked several tapas, Spanish snacks, and they were, well, not as good as hoped.  Actually they were awful.  I am still not sure what I did wrong.  Even so, I had fun making them, creating something new and different.  The game night was enjoyable, we had other good snacks to eat, and we all learned that tuna in half-raw dough was not appetizing. 

            All Southern women have to bake a batch of burned rocks before they can serve flaky biscuits, and we all have to cook pots of glue before serving creamy grits.  If no other lesson is learned we discover that a bad meal, a burned biscuit is not the end of the world.  We will be hungry again; we will eat again and cook again.  Daily.

            Of course this applies to other parts of life; taking risks, trying new things, failing at times but not letting failure stop you, all of this is necessary and a part of life.  If we fail, and learn from our failures, we grow.  Failure can be good.

            One year I attended Girl Scout Camp and I wanted to use the canoes.  Every girl had to take a canoe out on the lake, swamped it, turned it back over and demonstrated that they could bring the half sunken canoe back to the dock.  After passing this test we enjoyed the canoes with less fear.  We already knew what it felt like to capsize and we knew what to do.  Maybe our little failures are like that.  We see that we have failed and we move on.  We see what the worse thing that can happen is, and we are OK, we try again.