I was randomly reading some National Geographic (US edition) magazine back issues, when I found two very different meaning of failure.
The first failure I found was in an article titled ‘The God Particle’ from NG March 2008: “Many people at CERN are hoping they’ll get more than just answers: They’d like to uncover some new mysteries. John Ellis confided that he wouldn’t even mind if the LHC failed to find a Higgs. “Many of us theorists would find that failure much more interesting than if we just find another boring old particle that some theorists predicted 45 years ago.””
The second one I found was from April 2008 issue, in an article called The Sahel. One of the caption of its picture said: “Chad. A sudden downpour drenches women near Abeche during the rainy season. Changing climate has already brought the Sahel not only drier weather but also rains that fall too heavily, too early, or too late: In September 2007 floods inundated the normally parched region. As they have for centuries, the Sahel people are finding ways to adapt in a land so uncompromising that failure means death.”
Failure come and go in my life yet I never really think about it as I always think it is part of a normal human circle. It is, indeed.
When I read those two articles I think about how close yet different our little earth is. In the north people throw millions to build a big pipe across the border of two countries for the sake of knowledge, failure means a new way to learn some more fascinating things. Meanwhile in the south where people is literally have nothing failure means a lost for another soul, adding up a tally in the statistics, or maybe there’s no statistics about it, since no one bother.