circumstance recently led me to j.k. rowlings 2008 commencement address at harvard. for me, her twenty minute speech surpassed the combined value of all her potter books. mostly because she's pro-failure, something i'm quite ravenous about as of late. my favorite line, of many:
some failure in life is inevitable. it is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you fail by default.
next, we just need to figure out how to move this message down from post-college to pre-kindergarten.
also, as i had to remind bella as she shoulder-hacked me crafting this post, the real meat of failure is not in failing itself, but in the building of tools needed to climb out of life's many divots, holes, ditches, cliffs and canyons. so maybe perseverance is the better term. less ambiguous is the fact that the landscape is treacherous and circumstance requires us to travel large swaths of it in the dark.
