Okay. I’m going to start this one off on a little bit of a crude note, but I can’t neglect a failure of such pertinence to my life… Condoms. I’m thankful that they aren’t 100% successful, because I probably wouldn’t have ever existed otherwise. A “happy surprise,” I believe, is how my parents described my sudden presence.

Now that I have a child of my own, I sometimes think about how crazy it is that had she been conceived just a moment sooner or later, she wouldn’t be who she is at all. She’d have been a completely different human being. Even if a different sperm had fertilized the egg, she wouldn’t be who she is. It’s like a fluke that any of us were born. For some reason, that thought overwhelms me. That there are so many different people that could have been born but never will. I’m really thankful that chance favored my existence and that of those dear to me, but I can’t seem to stop myself from feeling a little guilty about having denied some other life from being lived.

Odd, repetitive, relatively useful thoughts, I know. What did you expect from a post about failure?