There is no failure in never giving up

It doesn't matter if you try and try and try again, and fail. It does matter if
you try and fail, and fail to try again. Charles Kettering

Last night my youngest daughter, Liseanne, and I were at the shelter where I work to interview clients for the Christmas Wish List. Four years ago a woman and her husband, (Jennie and Dan) set up the Wish List to provide an online site where individuals could go, connect with a homeless individual through reading their stories, and buy for them what they wished for Christmas.

This is the third year we've had the Wish List in Calgary, and it is always an inspiring and humbling event. Clients of the shelter talk with interviewers, give them a few details about their lives, describe what it is that they need to 'lift their spirits' and what they want for Christmas. Volunteers transcribe the information onto the web, and Calgarians can then read individual stories, buy them the gift they've asked for, bring it to the shelter and on Christmas morning know that someone has received their Christmas wish.

I'm always of mixed emotions with the process -- and yet, every Christmas morning for the past two years, the miracles that come alive on Christmas morning are stunning.

Last night, as I moved amongst the 800+ people milling about in our day area on the second floor, inviting clients to subscribe to the Wish List, one man told me after I'd asked if he'd signed up, "I did last year and didn't get what I wanted. Why bother?"

"What did you ask for?"

"An art portfolio," he replied.

This gentleman has sometimes come to art.works. He is very talented but suffers from mental health issues which inhibit his ability to work cooperatively with others. He continually distracts them with chatter, random comments and a steady stream of stories about whatever catches his mind. He's interesting, but in a program where clients volunteer to keep it running, it is not possible to have someone there who requires constant supervision. To keep him drawing, I provide him art paper and pencils. Sometimes, he'll take the supplies. Sometimes not.

"If you don't ask for what you want, you won't have any chance of getting it," I replied last night.

"That's okay," he told me. "I figure I tried once. No need to try again."

For many of the clients at the shelter, one failed attempt becomes the reason why they don't try again. Having been beaten down by life, people and circumstances, they finally give into the ennui. They give up on trying to be someplace else and accept where they're at as the only place they can ever be. The only place they deserve.

When we give up trying to change our circumstances, circumstances take over and we fail to see the possibility of change.

I don't know what brought most of the people to the shelter. I do know that whatever is keeping them there, they have given into believing they failed where ever they were at before homelessness swept in and took away their dreams, their aspirations, their belief in themselves, and their belief in a better life.

Giving up is not an option. Yet, for the majority of our clients, giving up on is the weight they carry every day. They struggle to climb out from beneath it, and fall back down into the belief, there's no point in trying. Nothing ever changes.

Everything changes when we change what we're doing.

Everything changes when we step away from the belief there's no point in trying, and get up and take another step in a new direction.

The question is: Are you giving into failure, or giving yourself everything you've got to succeed?