206. The Pain Of Failure

You put your whole being into everything you do. You do this automatically, because you care about the things you do and you want them done right.

To act in any other way would feel hollow and false. You cannot do less than your absolute best. If you did, you would detect the lie in your actions. It would be like you were performing a simulation rather than doing the real thing. You either give everything to what you do or you don’t do it at all.

You try your best so that you know any failure will not be the result of a lack of effort. When failure does happen, it’s devastating because you’ve invested so much of yourself and still you didn’t succeed.

When failure happens repeatedly, you begin to close yourself off. You begin to narrow the scope of your actions in order to reduce the risk of further grief. You become less active, which causes you to shrink into less. You fall into the stagnation of habit, a kind of repetitive non-life, where you go through the same motions day in, day out. These motions support your material existence but do nothing to supply you with meaning or purpose. From this numbness it becomes almost impossible to help another person or even yourself. Compassion stops being possible because you’ve cut yourself off from creative action.

To instead act boldly and keep yourself open to the world is a courageous choice. It means accepting that you’ll fail sometimes, and that it will mean pain. It will be painful simply because you care. To attempt to fight the pain or to block it will not be successful. These efforts will only cause the pain to solidify into an aversion to life that will push you towards stagnation and numbness.

You must instead accept the pain. When unwanted feelings arise, you must see them and recognize them, and allow them to pass on their own. In this way, you remain loose and attentive to the world, and then it becomes possible to act creatively and compassionately, even if it means pain once again.