I realize that I may be murdered in my sleep for saying this, but the Olympics really isn’t my thing. I generally don’t follow it and only knew it had begun when the Yahoo headlines started popping up.

But.

There is one thing I realized this year that I do really appreciate about the Olympics. People fail. 

Okay, okay–put your pitch forks away and hear me out.

It’s not that I like to see them fail. I HATE it. But I appreciate the fact that they sometimes do fail. And that they take the risk anyway.

These are top athletes. They are the best in the world. They’ve been training since childhood. In many cases, they’ve given up what would be considered a normal life for their sport, their craft. And for all those sacrifices–for the years of training and eating right and saying ‘no’ to a million fun things, they are–if they are the luckiest and the best–awarded three minutes of time in the Olympic games.

But then…

Some lose.

Some trip. Some crash. Some land badly. Some suffer horrible injuries.

They fail.

Failure is tough to take even in private, but these athletes don’t get that luxury. When they fail, they fail publicly, And they fail big-ly.

And it is probably the thing I respect the most about them–their willingness to risk, to give their all with no promise of a return. To me, it is what makes the games, and these athletes, truly great.

Most of them, when they fail, get back up and try the whole crazy thing again next time.

Maybe this has touched me so much this year because I’ve been thinking a lot about failure.

No one wants to fail. No one even wants to just be okay. And some of us will go to great lengths to avoid failing. Sometimes it means not trying. Sometimes it means quitting partway through. But the thing is, if we want to succeed, we have to risk failure. Always. (Lame, I know.  But still true.)

And we will fail–often several times in several ways before (and if) success ever taps us on the shoulder. I would even go so far as to say that failure is often the stepping stone to success (not to mention compassion-building for the struggles of our fellow man/woman).

I would love to be an amazing perfect mother/wife/writer/singer/human. The truth is that I’m not amazing or perfect at any of those things. And sometimes I’m downright awful at them. My kids watch too much TV. Or fight with each other. My book got a nasty pants bad review. Or didn’t sell as many copies as I wanted. Money is too tight. Time is too tight. And I’m not doing enough (or the right things) to fix either of solutions. (And these aren’t even the worst problems people have in life; not even close.)

But.

Somewhere in the discouragement of those fails, I still feel the pull to get back up. Oh, I don’t want to. It often seems futile anyway. But I drag my butt off the ground and back into my writing chair or the kitchen table or the drawing board (totally on par with those Olympians). You should too.

Maybe one day we’ll bring home a gold. Maybe we won’t. But either way, we’ll bring home a lifetime of experiences and pockets full of shiny pebbles we collected along the way. Gold or not, they’ll still sparkle. And so, my friends who are taking risks and not always sticking your landing, will you.