on failure

For most of my life, indeed from a young age, I was taught to avoid failure at all cost. As a younger man I encountered failure in the form of poor marks at school and rejection from the pretty girls whose orbits overlapped with mine. In my twenties and early thirties, failure was still something to be avoided, only that it had grown and morphed into a concept of monumental and cataclysmic disintegration of career and independence, the idea that my entire self-worth hinged upon my ability to meet some arguably low expectations and pay my bills on time. Since having started exploring a virtuous and simple life of yoga and meditation and writing and just being Me, however, my understanding of failure has changed dramatically. On some level, I know that I am indistinguishable from the Great Omnipresent Knowledge that is everything we know and see and everything we cannot fathom; some part of me understands that I am the Deity, the Chosen One, the Kwisatz Haderach, and, therefore, on a cosmic level, nothing I do will ever be wrong, and nothing I have ever done was a mistake. For the time being, though, I inhabit a human form, and my human form lives in a society of other humans, and the others call themselves Americans, and with this common Ynki horde I share certain mores and customs, traditions and habits, dreams and hopes and fears. Instead of looking upon the concept of failure with disdain, however, I am learning how to embrace it, redefine it, use it, cherish it, and harness the its power to achieve the spiritual calm and personal fulfillment that I never managed to find in success. As I stand before the precipice of grand and life-changing decisions I find myself acknowledging the dozens of little failures I achieve every day, things such as not holding a yoga pose for as long as I could have held it or letting my thoughts dictate my actions instead of breathing and taking a moment to become clear. I am adept at seeing my shortcomings but nearly blind to recognizing my own success, and instead of continuing to bash my head into that thick brick wall I am trying to trick myself into a positive state of mind by cherishing failure, that ubiquitous bogeyman, that damaging wraith. Ultimately, I am learning how to give myself permission to fail, which is perhaps one of the greatest of all of life's lessons. Aho.

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