A friend writes;

There’s this preacher in my town in Colorado here who was Mr. Always Spirited and Mr. Always Trying to Do Something Positive and he was the kind of guy who could always talk someone down from a ledge or who would always finish roofing the Habitat for Humanity House or whatever, and this weekend he blew his brains out.? If the smileys all snuff themselves, what does that mean for the grumps?

It’s sad, but anecdotally it does seem like many people who spend a lot of time and effort trying heroically to be  helpful end up with a terminal case of the blues.

I don’t know this person, and thankfully no one I have known well has suffered this malady, but it seems to me like at least some of these very helpful people are in part indulging in self-therapy, running apparently cheerily ahead of the reaper, until something trips them up.

This is by no means always fatal, but the consequences would seem to be serious enough to indulge in a bit of prophylactic melancholy, so that when one of the inevitable slings and arrows of outrageous fortune hits, it isn’t a mortal wound. In some ways, failure can act as a kind of inoculation, the old cliche being ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’.

Though I can’t recommend ‘vaccinating’ oneself by deliberately bringing misfortune down taking considered risks early in life almost guarantees a few serviceable failures. It isn’t the failures that work the magic, but what coping with failure teaches you. In incremental, but important ways, the skills you learn have survival value.

My own survival lessons include; flunking out of pre-med, losing at love, making a career move and finding myself alone and nearly broke in a strange city, asshole managers, brushes with the law, unbelievable working conditions, a couple of major disasters, marathon commutes, and myriad other indignities great and small, punctuated by bad relationships, boredom, and loneliness.

(Lest you think my life has been nothing but doom and gloom, I have spent less than 0.1% of my life even thinking about my personal failures, including this article. I’m deleriously happy now.)

In fact, the freedom to fail, and the imperative for letting failures occur could not be more timely than in the case of the financial and economic calamity we are facing right now. Failure in the cases at hand needs to happen, it should happen, it is not being permitted to happen, but in the end, after lots of painful, harmful, and completely necessary prolongation by government, I am convinced, it will happen anyway.

Dealing with each of these things taught me things about the corrective value of failure, the importance of family, and the support of good friends. I could easily have avoided failure by avoiding the risks. I could have accepted the failures as some divine judgement on my character, indicating to me that maybe I ought to tightly circumscribe my career and personal ambitions. Instead, I learned, I adapted, I sought out new directions, and I have prospered. Taking those risks has also taken me amazing places, shown me astonishing things, introduced me to incredible people, and enrichened my world beyond description.

And I’m still a realist. The world could go completely egg-shaped for me again one day. But I’ll be ready.