Living our life exposes us to our imperfections. If we are open nondefensively to this recognition, the outcome is humility. We find out we can’t click our heels, snap our fingers, and just magically overcome our imperfections. We see that we are a “work in progress” and progress is slow. In fact, it can feel like no progress at all.
Some would say it is uncanny (dictionary definition: strange or mysterious, especially in an unsettling way) how life keeps presenting our unresolved issues to us for us to face.
I’ve been alive long enough, and a therapist long enough, to know it is not uncanny at all that life seems to present our issues at nearly every opportune moment. We could say, Life is in our face. It fact, its in everyone’s face.
Call it what you want but Life seems pregnant and alive with an intelligence about our issues that keeps presenting us with new opportunities to grow and develop. I believe there is a benevolence to this; but it does not always feel like it, especially when we resist dealing with these “opportunities for growth”, or we keep failing. Who likes to fail?
And then there is the “how” to grow. A tendency might be to bare down and will ourselves to overcome some weakness. This leads to deep despair, as we can’t possibly keep it up.
Here’s another possibility, and it involves one of life’s riddles. What if the point was not the failure, but how we treat ourselves in the failure.
Rather than voicing self condemnation, criticism, even self loathing, what if we showed ourselves patience, kindness, forgiveness and mercy when we fail. Would we fail worse? Perhaps try it and find out. Practicing mercy, gentleness, and kindness is not “letting ourselves off the hook.” We continue to work at it… we just show more self acceptance when we fail.
Does this feel like a foreign concept? Why not put it to the test. I would suggest that self-condemnation does not make you more successful overcoming any particular weakness. The path that puts us on the road to true and authentic growth and liberation comes not through our success, but through our accepting failure. The way we interact with Life changes us and we are shaped in new and powerful ways. It deepens us in fruitful ways.