The Last Word

By Louis Harris | Posted: Tuesday March 20, 2018

"Oh bugger", one of the many words we use when things really haven’t gone our way. Missed out on UE by a single credit? Bugger. Procrastinated too hard and failed that internal? Bugger. Stuffed up in that vital match and ended up losing by a single point? Bugger.

These are all the classic OB’s tropes that come out to play when we discuss failure. No doubt you would have heard them before, and no doubt you’ll probably hear them again.

The reality of it is, a lot of the things we do here at school are built on houses of cards, and no matter how strong you think your structure is, it only takes one bad placement to send your whole structure toppling down. Take UE for instance, some students have been fixated on university study since Year 9, but a few failed assessments in Year 13 can put a very quick end to that goal.

One of my own “oh bugger” moments came as a teeny weeny Year 9 student. Being a very small Year 9 with an extremely large head to body ratio and massive glasses, plus having been at the school and in Dunedin for all of 2 minutes, all I was after was some public acceptance. So when the then Rector, Mr Rennie called my name up for an award, I was pretty gassed, only to trip on that step right there and do a significant hand plant onto the ground. Oh bugger! And at that moment, while all the other juniors were laughing at me, I didn’t really care for my participation Maths certificate anymore, but just to get the heck off that stage. I’ll tell you what, it took me a long time to rebuild my confidence after that one. Even two years later, when I thought everyone had long since forgotten, I still had the odd person coming up to me and saying, “hey, remember that time…”

The point is, sometimes our "oh bugger" moments come very unexpectedly and you feel like you’ll never quite be able to restore yourself to former glory. Whether it’s logging in on results day to see a congregation of NAs, or losing that vital match because of an absolute ‘moment’, it’s inevitable that at some point, we’ll all be saying “oh bugger”. But the most important thing to remember, is that when these moments happen, it’s more often than not, all our fault. When you don’t pass the year, because you couldn’t be bothered finishing one biology internal, there’s no point trying to blame the teacher. The bad workman always blames his tools.

The problem with hindsight is that it’s the best vision we’ve got. If you do reach that low point and are completely buggered, the best step is to not dwell on the past, but rather to learn from it and improve yourself going forward. You can’t reverse the past, but it can certainly give you a better vision for the future. If you work hard enough at whatever you want to do, hopefully you’ll be saying “bugger” less often.

Richard Paul Evans once said, “It has been a mistake living my life in the past. One cannot ride a horse backwards and still hold its reins.”