I’ve fumbled courtesies, botched projects, and failed ambitions. I’ve tripped over myself and others, painfully. I’m learning, misstep by misstep, who it is I actually am.
Today, I am a scientist-writer-poet-mystic whose pain is never wasted. Who broaches the world with fierce curiosity and ravenous intellect. Who holds herself and others softly, with the fleshy springiness of an open palm.
But I’m not attached to that self-definition. We trap ourselves, sometimes, in the narrative we use. Don’t split your life at its joints, the easy breaking points. Crack your story down its middle, to discover what marrow was within all along.
“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke
My most acrid disappointments are lessons in authenticity.
In every moment, I’m trying to turn towards my most genuine self. But to “turn towards” means to pivot from something else. When I look over my life, my failures are where I decieved myself, conforming to a dissonant circumstance.
A successful failure is when it swivels you toward a truer level of being. Or, a successful failure is when you do what you set out to, anyway.
Martha Beck is a sociologist, life coach, and best-selling author. When I was at a crossroads in my life, my mom put her book “Steering by Starlight” in my hands. It helped me dispel my own fear, and helped me dare to admit my hopes, even if just to myself.
One concept she describes (that I return to at least weekly) is “Your Best Worst Thing.”
Basically, it’s the idea that as you look at the blessings of your current life, they’re all contingent on a bad thing in your past. The best thing in your life that you cherish most, would not, could not be in your life if it weren’t for some past disappointment.
Would you have met your spouse if you got that job in Ottowa? Or, though that heartbreak was crushing, would you have felt the impetus to move to Africa without it? Or, if it weren’t for being laid off, would you have discovered your love of painting?
That’s how I look back at my failures. Opportunities for growth and deeper self-honesty. And also the bedrock from which my future opportunities and joys and inevitable heartbreaks grow. If I at all love who I am in the present, I have to credit my past failures.
What’s your perspective on failure? How do you reconcile past disappointments? Is something coming to nothing just that? Nothing? Do you find meaning in it?
Failure is one step closer to accomplishment/success. Do we ever truly reconcile past disappointments? There is no such thing as nothing, there is something in everything, even number zero has a quantitative value in an equation.
Failure is one step closer to accomplishment/success. Do we ever truly reconcile past disappointments? There is no such thing as nothing, there is something in everything, even number zero has a quantitative value in an equation.
What is failure? What is fear? I say they are phantoms of our own acceptance.
Reminds me of a conversation I had this week with a smart girl 🌀