Failure

When the situation assumes a status and position that is not stable but also all the time to bring in corrective measure is exhausted, failure must be accepted. In accepting failure, we realise now, it is only a failure of the circumstance and not of the self. People cannot fail, only situations can. All the months spent in slack and a lack of motivation come back in the form of regret. But the only thing to be done with failure is to learn from it. Learning can only happen without guilt, because guilt requires us to defend ourselves from the failure because it points fingers at us and makes us feel uncomfortable. Not surprisingly the channels of psychology and those of spirituality run in parallel. Both advocate a general avoidance of guilt. We still feel guilty, but we do not hold on to it, we let it pass. Guilt in turn produces more failure and if not stemmed at the root, it further causes more guilt to be produced. Guilt can be offensive as well as defensive. It can either paint a picture in which the self is above all blame, and the other is responsible for the entire mess or it can be defensive which accepts fault for the entire circumstance. Both are only irrational perspectives and although truth might reside somewhere in the middle, the other might not ever accept any part of the blame. One has to align oneself away from the idea of singular truth when multiple parties are involved. People understand but they will not articulate what they understand. Because sometimes power allows one to lie and it is not possible to call the lie out.

To experience the therapeutic value of failure, one needs to believe in the zero-state and have a capacity to begin afresh. Mistakes can be corrected when repeating a similar task or process and a similar decision needs to be made. The overall arc of the person moves ahead through these hops and twists, across multiple chapters and calamities. People are more than events and events are only episodic exposures of what people are.

But for failure to become a fountainhead of knowledge, it needs to be one of the possible outcomes. If no possibility of failure has been accounted for except a default, then there is no possibility of learning and growing as the horizon of the person’s process presents itself face to face. Such an abrupt event does not occur if it can be helped and avoided. Only if the actors are challenged in a fundamental way, do they bother to flex their muscles and then only to demonstrate that they have teeth and there have no hesitation in using them.

To avoid such confrontations, mistakes have to be acknowledged but the successes have to be pointed towards too. No one likes to pay for a broken car. And whether the car is broken to temporarily broken depends on thecae salesman’s skills.

Acceptance of the broken needs to be shrouded within the glory of the functioning. Each function of the eventual spectacle was designed to work with the other. The set remains punctured but new arrangements have to be defined for the pieces that remain to make sense.