–John Burroughs

If you blame someone for your failures, then you have to give them credit for your successes. Obviously they are in control of your life, but it is you who are responsible for your life. Don’t abdicate that responsibility. It may feel good to blame someone else, but why blame at all? We don’t fail, but maybe we just haven’t succeeded yet. Or we need to reevaluate what we are trying to achieve and maybe decide to follow a different path. The feeling of failure doesn’t make you a failure. Sometimes it is a message from the universe that you are not on the path that is in your best interest!

While reading this quote, what came to my mind was another quote by Victor Frankl, who was a survivor of the Holocaust. I found it helpful when thinking about victims and perpetrators and the act of blaming. These are such important issues in a world so full of cruelty and vengeance. “What is to give light must endure burning. Everything can be taken from a man or a woman, but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. Fear may come true that which one is afraid of.”

It was this belief that helped him survive.