Failures and Writing are Ancient Allies of Awareness
Underrated Failures, Sparks of Awareness (Through Writing)
You know, failures hurt even more when they remain blended into our soul, sometimes without a name to call them, or, even worse, staying with the feeling of guilt.
I’m Italian. Here, failures are sins.
Religion says that forgiveness is the recipe to go beyond sins. On the other hand, common sense says not admitting failures is almost not failing; hide failures and you’ll be a winner.
Hiding is like forgetting failures in the past. But, in disguise, forgiving is also a way of hiding losses in the past. It’s a loop.
It took me over 40 years to understand that all that is a guilty — ehm, I still have to clean up my vocabulary—waste of time and energy.
Failures break linearity
Linear thinking is a double-edged sword. We expect things to turn out the way we imagine, as if they should follow a well-defined, straight path toward the future.
Failures are deviations from those expectations. They are variations of happenings that we refuse to consider because they are not desired.
Out of the blue, that well-defined and straight path deviates and hurts our will.
The problem is we look at the world through our will, and failures have the power to disrupt how we understand our experiences, which we’d like to be linear.
Try to write, “Since A happened, I expected B to follow.” Replace A and B with two events you were convinced would happen in a row. Then, ask yourself, “Did it make sense?” Remember that “A implies B” is linear thinking:
A => B
Linearity is a way to model the world. Another model is complexity, for which the relationship cause-effect isn’t knowable, so you can’t have expectations at all.
By definition, each model is wrong; the point is whether the model is helpful for whatever purpose. And that’s the next step: jot your objectives down because they measure the intensity of your frustration in case of failures.
Failures frustrate expectations
When expectations and reality diverge, we get frustrated. We are biological systems aimed at the will, so what we want is what must happen.
Where’s the respect here? There’s missing respect in such a mindset, aimed at survival by imposing ourselves on the world.
But desires and rights are different. Desires have to do with the will, while rights have to do with rules.
When we confuse the two, we inevitably get frustrated. But it’s due to our inconvenient mindset, not to failures.
Failures often make us stubbornly look for a scapegoat to relieve us of our responsibilities. This is the least convenient mindset we can put in place.
Instead, failures are resources to exploit because they reveal something usually hidden.
Failures reveal boundaries
Expectations and reality diverge when we neglect boundaries, and failures remind us of them.
Be honest: when you’re frustrated because of a failure, looking back, could you state that your expectations were aligned with your limitations?
Perhaps you didn’t know about your limitations because, at that time, they weren’t knowable. A failure reveals your limits; afterward, you are a more robust human.
Failures have a lot to do with learning.
Why do most people stay ignorant all along their lives? Because they soon stop failing and learning. And they stop because learning goes through failures, and failures hurt by revealing their life’s boundaries.
Boundaries need acceptance. It’s not easy to admit to being less than expected. Yet, that’s the step toward awareness, and writing is how to get into it safely.
Write on paper what’s tough for you to admit; you can always burn it if you find the experience intolerable.
Yet, if you go beyond, you discover that boundaries and failures are the bricks of your future.
Can you imagine a child learning to walk then run, never scraping a knee, maybe even breaking a leg? Evidently not, because those injuries are part of growing up. We grow through injuries, not despite them.
Failures make humans write (hopefully)
Failures are whirlwinds. They turn everything upside down.
Instead, words on paper are stable, even when they trace a whirlwind.
When everything is upside down, we, as humans, need stability to come out of trouble. Writing is this coveted stability.
It doesn’t matter how good you are at writing. The purpose is to accept yourself, not to win a writing prize, and only through writing can you see failures for what they really are, which is a step toward success.
Why is writing the only solution? Written words are outside.
Only by creating distance between our judgment and our thoughts can we appreciate the difference and not confuse opinion and fact. And writing our thoughts on a piece of paper is the only means of creating that distance. And change ourselves in depth.
Wrap up
Writing doesn’t change facts, but it does.
I remember the first time I listened to Emanuele Severino saying that after the Greeks' philosophy, men have died differently because they conceived the ‘nothingness’ so that dying was going into the ‘nothingness.’
This thought made me think. I’m an empiricist. I was convinced that dying was a biological happening and that it was the same for each man in the past as well as in the future, regardless of their culture.
I was wrong.
If you’re not into any religious mindset, you might accept that dying is going into the ‘nothingness.’
Yet, even if you believe in God, the nature of your God is the absolute denial of ‘nothingness.’ In this sense, the idea of God is rooted in ‘nothingness’ by refusal.
Dying is the final failure; change how you feel about failures, and you change, accordingly, what you think about dying.
Emanuele Severino was right.
That’s the power of words.
Writing makes words the eternal human mirror of the world. This eternity makes them stable and reliable regardless of whether they are wrong or right. And this is the point: you get awareness when you divest yourself of the presumption of right or wrong.
There’s nothing more I can write to convince you. Now it’s up to you: write and be free.
