Success is getting up one more time

Things that I forget:
1. The world is not fair
2. Luck can be cruel
3. Bad times endure no matter how much you protest
4. Good times pass too quickly no matter how much you beg
5. Everything passes

Japanese: "nana korobi ya oki:
English: " Fall down seven times, get up eight"

A Prayer for Strength:

May the universe give me ample good times and bad
Provide frequent opportunities to stand up to the tide
and endure the onslaught of distasteful situations.

To practice being brave:
Fail your driving test 5 times
endure countless bad relationships
survive being unpopular
continue even though everyone is not kind
and move from failure to failure to failure
to success.

Success is merely getting up one more time than you fall down.
It matters not how many times you fail,
only that you get up again.

Context: right now I cannot get a job. I've been trying for a year for anything other than subbing. no dice. this is good practice for the gauntlet of rejections I will later face as a beginning writer with a first ( and perhaps 2nd and 3rd manuscript). And it's been like this for a long time. Failure after failure. I feel like most of the first 10 YEARS of my teaching career has been failure. It depends on how you measure it.

But I'm still here.
I'm still teaching.
So I've got THAT going for me.