Sit With Failure: It Teaches
The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.
-John Cassavetes
Failure.
Even reading that word evokes stress. We look to the world and we see success promoted everywhere we go. We celebrate successes with parties - graduations, engagements, and babies born.
Failures we don't talk about. We tend to hide, or we ignore.
Yet, which is the better teacher? Which spawns growth?
Sitting in a moment when failure appears to be the Modus Operandi, one begins to be tasked with looking at things differently.
Failure becomes the Great Teacher.
Why not look to failure and ask questions, be graceful with it and ourselves during instances of failure (this is not easy), and try to learn?
As time continues to roll forward, as it does without much of our control, why not address failure as this teacher?
Mistakes, failures, brokenness all invite us to sit in stillness.
The stillness comes, if we allow it to, and in that stillness we hear our own voice.
The stillness is not easy. In fact, it is harder than the failure at times, as it requires seeking support internally instead of externally. This is not easy.
But it is oh, so necessary.
Our lives, our bodies, our minds and souls all desire homeostasis.
In nature, homeostasis is:
the state of steady internal, physical, and chemical conditions maintained by living systems. This is the condition of optimal functioning for the organism and includes many variables, such as body temperature and fluid balance, being kept within certain pre-set limits.
You are nature. Therefore your life, body, mind and soul desire this equilibrium. This balance. And this state of balance is when you are optimal.
To get there, failure, one might argue MUST happen.
If the entire universe is conspiring in your favor, and dear reader, it is then failure is meant for your growth.
In the middle of extreme job loss, the death of a loved one, repeated trials, no one wants to hear this Law of Attraction 'mumbo-jumbo.'
But, perhaps, if one can be gentle with one's self and admit that something in the failure was absolutely necessary.
Pictured above is an example of a Japanese pottery technique called kintsugi. In kintsugi, the potter repairs broken pottery using powdered gold mixed with tree sap to create a unique adhesive of sorts.
What this has taught me and thousands of others is that while we break, we do not stay that way.
Regardless of size or magnitude, failures have a way of breaking us.
Those broken parts or cracks can, and are, repaired.
The design, however, is what you make of it.
Do you allow yourself to be put together, dusted with powdery gold, to emerge even more beautiful than before? Or, do you stay broken and in a state of disrepair?
Friend, you have the choice.
And, furthermore, in you lies the tools you need to move forward in a manner that is befitting your success and ultimately your joy.
How you choose to move is up to you, and this writing is merely meant as a reminder to propel you into the next part.