Your Efforts Are Meant to Fail but Your Journey Is Never In Vain

Ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things

Photo by Caleb Jones on Unsplash

Thank you all for the comments and support you have shown me in my last post. To me, I didn’t walk away with any loss, only great experiences.

Here is an article I wrote not long ago that best describes how I see life.

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“The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry”

This is a debut novel by Rachel Joyce, a British playwright who has won numerous awards in the British stage theatre industry.

When the book was first published, the work became a hit, popular in 30 or 40 countries, and sold nearly 5 million copies worldwide. Joyce also won the British Book Award “Writer of the Year” for this book.

The novel tells the story of an obscure old man, Harold, who started a pilgrimage of 87 days and 627 miles because of a letter from an old friend who was suffering from cancer. There are no characters with their own halo in the book and no earth-shattering stories, but it still touched the hearts of countless people.

Ordinary people can try extraordinary things

In this journey of life, you don’t always just go forward. Sometimes you go sideways, sometimes you go backward, and sometimes you stop. But no matter what, life is never in vain. Every step you take is a chapter in your life story.

The main character Harold is 65 years old. He is an ordinary person by every means and after his retirement, his life was repetitive and monotonous. Every morning when he opened his eyes, he would eat, read the newspaper, stay in a daze, and sleep.

He doesn’t have many friends, the house feels empty, yet he hardly ever leaves the house, and he doesn’t talk much with his wife, Maureen. The boring days left him confused in his later years.

Once upon a time, he and Maureen loved each other very much. The young Maureen married him despite the opposition of their parents. Later, the two had a son, and the family of three was happy.

But more than 20 years ago, his son committed suicide at home due to depression. Maureen resented that he neglected to care for his son. The whole family was immersed in grief, and all the enthusiasm and motivation in his life stopped at that moment.

He worked in his mediocre post until he retired. He then moved to the country and cut off all social interaction. One may think he would go through his whole life numbly just like that. But a letter would make waves in Harold’s life. The letter was from Queenie, an old friend who has cancer.

Harold took his reply letter and walked to the mailbox on the corner of the street. The letter had already been put into the mouth of the mailbox, but he stopped, ashamed of the weak words in his letter.

At this time, he met a girl who said to him:

“…trusting what you don’t know and going for it. Believing you can make a difference.”

Those words woke Harold, who decided to walk more than 600 miles to visit Queenie, expecting to pray for her in this devout way.

He knew that he was no longer young and had no experience in long-distance travel, and even had to face physical pain and the torment of loneliness, but he thought to himself, just keep going step by step, and he’ll get there.

No matter which path you choose, as long as you don’t stop, you will always find a way.

When you go through this period of time and look back, you will find that you are much stronger than you imagined, and life has long had the strength to resist despair.

The detours in life are not without reason

For Harold, the road ahead was not smooth, even treacherous. Caught up with the wind and rain, the road became muddy. Because of the lack of navigation, he repeatedly took several detours, causing his legs and feet to swell and make it difficult to move even an inch.

He tried to walk but unfortunately fell again and again. He could not move and had to be sent by passers-by to Martina, a female doctor from Slovakia. During the days of treatment, Martina unintentionally asked about his son, revealing the hidden scars in Harold’s heart.

Remembering his son descended into depression due to his fruitless job search after college graduation, he could not comfort him but watched him fall into despair before finally taking his own life from this world.

Faced with inquiries from Martina, he said in tears: “It will never get better.”

Upon hearing his account, Martina calmly recalls her own story.

When she was young, she left her home for love and settled in a foreign land. But her boyfriend ends up running away with another woman, leaving her to take care of her boyfriend’s dog. After so many years, she and the dog are still waiting for the boyfriend to return.

It turns out many people’s seemingly ordinary lives are full of bitterness and hardships. They just stubbornly disguise themselves to ignore the pain and run away from their failures.

This gave Harold a deeper understanding of the meaning of making that trip.

Those regrets and obsessions in your life, those detours you have taken, are actually quietly reminding you not to repeat the same mistakes in the future. Harold began to face his shortcomings, prepared for his trip and was full of positive energy.

Believe that every detour is an opportunity to grow

Before the trip, Harold seemed to be an oddball in this world. He did everything alone, didn’t know how to express his love, and was afraid of taking responsibility.

Along the way, scenes from the past played out in his mind for him to face his truest self.

During the journey, he repented and then faced up to his own problems. When talking to a woman who lost a child, Harold could relate to Maureen’s resentment towards him and the pain of a lack of love. Instead of being a “cold person”, he began trying to communicate with his wife and open up each other’s hearts.

The trip also changed Maureen

After losing her son, she could not control herself all this while, lost her enthusiasm for life, and closed her heart to her husband. In the days after Harold left, Maureen missed her love for her husband again and began to reflect on the misunderstanding she had brought on her husband because of the son she’d lost.

When tragedy strikes, he transfers all the blame to her husband to ease her remorse. It turned out that her previous anger with her husband stemmed from her own misjudgment.

In the story, when Harold arrives at the end, his dying old friend dies.

Facing loss, Harold did not collapse but calmed down. He knew there was nothing he could do, but if he didn’t finish the pilgrimage, there would always be a sense of regret and remorse in his heart.

The pilgrimage couldn’t save Queenie, but Harold’s journey was not in vain. He and Maureen found each other again, reconciled with their past failures, and happiness was once again back on their faces.

Every experience in life has its meaning. Every step you take has its purpose.

Takeaways

Sometimes the only thing you can do in the face of hopelessness is to treat having-no-regret as a motto in life.

What’s lost is lost, it is meaningless to say in hindsight. It is better to simply do your best and move on, whatever the outcome. When you have done your best, you have done your duty, everything else is not in your control. Let it be; let it go.

The reality is cruel, a lot of efforts are meant to fail, a lot of attempts are destined to be futile. But that does not mean our journey will be in vain. If you believe in your purpose, you will live a life of no regrets and that in itself is a life worth living.

Just as everyone and everything you meet, whether it brings you happiness or sadness, they are both precious moments in life, and they are there to help you learn and grow.

They teach you to be strong and help you learn to love so that after you recognize the truth of life, you can still believe that the world is beautiful and that life is worth it.

Some suffering is to speed up your recovery; some setbacks are to make you understand the truth of life;

Some regrets are for the sake of letting you see the happiness of the moment; some partings are for a better encounter next time.

There is no need to be an irreparable disappointment, and there is no need to worry about being powerless, just walk the journey, and time will give you the answer.

There is no dead end on this road, it may not lead you to where you want to go, but it will take you to where you have to be. The most important part of this journey is never the destination, but the meaning you create with every step you take.