The discussions this week took us through failure as a construct, habits of failure, failing ourselves and others, and choice paralysis with a fear of failure.
What is failure?
Many individuals within the groups said that there was no such thing as failure because we learn from our mistakes, therefore they are a string of learnings. In retrospect there seems to be no such as thing as failure from a certain perspective. A perspective in which believes in taking responsibility and creating an opportunity from the situation.
However, there are dynamics and patterns that perpetuate again and again, gaining more intensity that can lead to crisis. Perhaps we are blind to the responsibility we hold that contributes to the feedback loop? Or maybe we wish to ignore the responsibility?
Either way it is a choice to use failure as a key to expand and evolve. It seems that it will continue to happen until we make this choice.
Avoiding failure seems to come before the fact. I avoid failure by failing. Which could be seen as a greater failure. Or simply my perpetual pattern that I can choose to take the responsibility.
I have had a semi-regular dream in which I am standing at the top of a very tall thin aerial hundreds of meters in the air. I have suddenly arrived there, any move that I make that is not considered could be the end of my life. The stress of making a wrong decision leads me to jump and get the failing over and done with. To simply die before trying.
This dream is a metaphor for my dysfunctional or functional adaptive mechanism of dealing with the fear of failure. Controlling the situation by forcing failure upon myself, keeping it internal, never really going the whole way with anything.
This is rather cynical and depressing, but in identifying the pattern I can try something new. Like sitting in the extreme fear and slowly, methodically climbing down the tall thin aerial, using all my strength and focus to its maximum capacity. I fear that even when I employ all my strength, focus, and creativity in a determined way I will still fail and I believe this failure as catastrophic because it breaks my delusion of being ‘special’.
Avoiding failure is failure. A lesson is being learned but it’s the same one and it perpetuates the same story.
What if we are faced with these patterns as ancestral challenges, or to put it in a different perspective karma or soul lessons that pass from one life to the next?
Imagine if our society and culture was geared towards unlocking our limiting patterns. Because presently the values we have distract us from this kind of deep work and make it easy to ignore the opportunity to take responsibility when failure presents itself.
Failing ourselves does have a lot of factors at play; from societal expectations, traditions, to our own interpersonal relationship with ourselves. In these two discussions we realised that failing ourselves and others were really what failure is all about.
This topic has stayed with me over the weekend and into the next week. I have brought up discussions with friends, family and my partner. I realised I was so full of anxious thoughts around failing in relationship and my projects. After having some medicinal cbd/thc, my mind dropped down a gear freeing up space to allow new thoughts to flow through. I realised that my mind seems to be geared around identifying dangers and when it cannot be known I create the idea that there is no way forward. This leads to a controlled failure.
Being presented with the unknown can lead to a controlled failure. This is true of relationships, dreams, adventures, etc. It once again signals the need to create a relationship with uncertainty and the unknown and pioneer forward anyway.
It has been a super helpful topic and I am sorry it has become quite a personal blog post this time. I hope you still enjoy it.
Lots of love
Hadley x
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