Failure

Imagine putting all your eggs in one basket – not out of laziness or wishful thinking, but because you know it is the right basket. Imagine seeing clearly the good work that life has set before you and setting out into the wide landscape of that work. For years you labor for your love, moved by its beauty and purity. You are driven by your love of the work and the good it will do. All along, the world is saying, kindly, that there is little or no hope that you will succeed, that you are too small, that the work isn’t worth doing. Still you continue, bound to this effort by conviction.

The time comes to see if that work will function. Can it prove its worth? Can it live beyond the walls of your own thinking and effort?

Can you imagine putting all your heart and soul into something, knowing it is right, and then watching it fail before your very eyes? All the heroes of the world have done that very thing. We look on them now and call them glorious successes, but in their beginnings they were all failures. What of their years spent in unrecognized toil? The dread and fear that they were crazy? “If I am right,” they say, “why does everyone disagree with me? Why am I the only one pursuing this idea?” Don’t you think that all our heroes spent untold hours agonizing over tactics, wondering how to care for this child they were bringing into the world? How to communicate their inspiration to others? The people who have most deeply expressed love, who have shown us creativity, honor, intelligence, and purity have not always felt inspired. They had no assurance that their work would be accepted – that it wouldn’t just fall to the floor, useless. What was to make them believe they could succeed where so many others fall by the wayside? They have fought within themselves for assurance. They have rested, not on the insured success of a project, but on the rightness of it. They have set their hopes on the necessity that the work be done, on their love of life, and on their desire to see it borne into the world. They have risked it all.

We are so afraid of failure! But look! Failure is not failure. When you are doing what is right by your heart, learning from your mistakes, and robustly moving onward, you cannot fail. You can only learn, get bigger, humbler, and better. This is life! Not to rest but to explore! Digging deep ensures that we will encounter challenges. And there is nothing for it but to dig deeper, let our desire to do the work be purified and transformed. Then, bit by bit, we find that we are the wise ones, the ones who know the real rules and can live by them. We become less afraid of failing because we have failed and seen that it was not the end of the world. We begin to flow more smoothly, and are less easily terrified.

Let us work with all our hearts to succeed, but when failure appears, let us not fear it. Let us not think it reflects upon who we are. Let us spring to our feet and continue the work, altering it and reforming it to succeed where it failed before. Let it and us grow by experience. The work will change, deepen, and grow. It will not be done in a quick moment.

Everyone who has really succeeded has come upon this. They have all failed. And then continued. They have been uncertain. They have been discouraged, beaten, utterly demoralized. And when they returned to the work, when they returned to the effort to serve and help the world, the assurance of its simple, obvious goodness revitalized and transformed them.