Through the Garden Gate – May: Hope and Failure

Shakespeare said that “April is the cruelest month,” but Shakespeare never lived in Duluth. Since I moved here 8 1/2 years ago, I’d have to argue that May is the cruelest month. Rain, East winds, capricious temperatures, with a few warm, sunny days thrown in to mess with our minds.

There is a rule of 3’s regarding survival: “You can survive 3 months without companionship or love, 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water, 3 hours without shelter (in extreme circumstances), 3 minutes without air, but only 3 seconds without hope.”

A Minnesota, May garden is an exercise in hope. Tiny little plants start pushing up through the ground. I have hope that those lily bulbs will one day look like this again:



But, for now my garden only gives me tiny, little hopeful reminders.

A single stalk of asparagus:



A brave, little johnny-jump-up:



My bleeding heart, just beginning to bloom:


I plant my vegetables with hope; hope that I will have a fabulous harvest at the end of the summer.

And yet, hope also carries with it the fear of failure. Why do we as humans fear failure so much? We all fail. In fact, just today I was explaining to my middle son that neither I nor his dad were perfect. “That’s good,” he replied. “That would be annoying.”

It is annoying when people attempt to be perfect or expect perfection from us, yet why do we expect it of ourselves?

Hope and failure go hand in hand. We fall down, we get back up. We have hope and faith that we will do it better the next time; that we learn our lessons and come out of each successive failure better people, stronger people.

In an article I read today, Kate Hudson said, “Fail, fail again, fail better. Only in failure do you reach success. You can only get to the good stuff when you’ve done the hard stuff.”

Failure is hard, but there is always hope that we will come out on the other side. Failure never lasts forever. Get back up. Keep hoping.