Cyclically it comes the moment to think about failure. I apologize in advance for this is not a sexy topic, especially in a society where success is so hyped.
Nobody likes to fail, and it appears that the main reason people fear failure is because it feels very bad.
Failure is raw, shameful, full of despair. A sense of impending doom, a bleeding happening right in the soul accompanies us when we realize that what we longed for or expected to happen turned the wrong way.
Put it more simply, failure hurts.
I had my dose of failures in life and took the full brunt of them.
Four years ago I set sail with my boat with the ambitious plan to sail to Patagonia. Instead what came next was a divorce and a complete change of plans. Life simply pulled the rug out from under my wishful thinking.
A little earlier, when I started my psychology practice, I had to borrow money to pay my taxes because the cash flow was very bad. I felt insolvent and amateurish, and I recoiled, feeling the rest of my career was doomed.
These are not by any means catastrophic events. Yet the subjective experience was very intense and wounding, and I was tempted to lash out at alleged culprits or to bury the head in the sands of despair, isolating myself from the rest of the world thinking I would not try anything else, anymore.
Big or small, failure comes with a whole set of painful emotions.
We are afraid of that pain, more of the failure itself. We encounter very early such dreadful experiences as living brings with it the possibility of getting hurt , and so we quickly learn to avoid them.
The hardest part during those moments in fact is not to run away from the feeling itself. The temptation is to look for sedative experiences, in order to avoid the displeasure. Gathering the energy and decision to change course seems impossible as we look hopeless at the future.
I always like to think that, if I chose it according to my tastes and preferences, my life would have turned out not as good as the one I have the luck to be living. I would definitely never have sailed in the ocean, as I have always been enamored of mountain climbing. A series of failures created the deviations from the plan that created space for new fruitful possibilities. On the contrary, it often happens that we get stuck in a place with no escape route when we follow our will submissively.
Taking out failures, my life would have been a banal platitude, maybe full of accomplishments, but steered by my limited capacity to choose what is right or wrong.
The famous zen story about the farmer and the horse is the paradoxical description of how we may not be the best judges of our own development and luck.
In fact the wrong turns, the paths denied by external or internal circumstances open new doors and possibilities to our growth. The unexpected, unforeseen circumstances, even the ones that bring displeasure, come to help us correct the course we are on.
“Despite our total lack of control over any of these occurrences, each of us made it through to this point in our lives—so it might at least be worth entertaining the possibility that when the uncontrollable future arrives, we’ll have what it takes to weather that as well. And that you shouldn’t necessarily even want such control, given how much of what you value in life only ever came to pass thanks to circumstances you never chose.”
Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,
No one ever knows what is going to happen next, that’s why it is important to keep holding on while the storm is raging and then find another route to sail.