After God, the next thing that heals is Philosophy. Is your life battered and shattered? Find help here.
"Life is like a shell bursting into fragments which are again shells," Henri Bergson says. This, perhaps, is a poetic assertion, something no different from Siddhartha Gautama's position when he says that life is characterized by suffering.
Bergson describes the universe as a cone, with the Absolute at the acme. Hence, the movement up unifies things while the movement down separates them. Picture this better, thinking of passing grains through the wide end of a funnel turned upside down. This may better explain why life is easy for those closer to the source, say God or money or some positive force.
Virtually everyone aspires to the top. Some get there, some die on the climb. Life is hard, really. This begins to make sense placed side by side Bergson who describes life as a conflict between mind and matter. Mind is that aspiration and effort to succeed, while matter informs the forces that try to push us down.
"In order that the upward motion of mind may be able to thread its way through the downward motion of the falling bodies which hail upon it, it must be able to cut out paths between them." This is exactly why strategy is needed to succeed, and strategy is a product of the intellect.
You have failed in the past. You're worried you may fail again. Or perhaps your case is different: You've succeeded now (in your own definition of the word), but you're still bothered about the many times you failed. You think this so because you think of time as mathematical and intrinsically bound with space. Bergson thinks differently. "In memory, the past survives in the present," he says. Life isn't measured in time, as in days or years. It isn't measured at all. Life is "pure duration", "an endless stream of becoming, in which nothing becomes and there is nothing that this nothing becomes."
Worry less. Breathe. Take what you think of as past, take all your experiences of life and lump them in the present. Life is like a passing film. One day you wake up to find that you're dead. Or, you just die and never even realize you ever lived. Think of life as life, something not meant to be understood. Just live it worrying less!
PS: Bertrand Russell thinks that "those to whom activity without purpose seems a sufficient good will find in Bergson's [philosophy] a pleasing picture of the universe. But those to whom action, if it is to be of any value, must be inspired by some vision,...will find in [him] nothing of what they seek, and will not regret that there is no reason to think it true." But he, Russell, never imagined our world would become this tumultuous, one where psychological comfort is needed to thrive, something embedded in Bergson.