Start. Succeed (or not), Repeat

This mantra that I ripped out of a magazine, has followed me – on display within every desk, home office space and office nook that I’ve had for the past 20 years. Start. Succeed (or not), repeat.

Sometimes the most simple collection of words can be utterly powerful. I’ve used it to remind myself to be OK with failure, OK with stopping, and starting over, and to stay committed to, well – staying committed. Back when I first tore that saying out of whatever I was reading, I am certain that I was more concerned with staying successful, as I hadn’t developed a solid friendliness with failure. Then, life happened. Unexpected things happened. The glimmer of promise that failure instigated made me slightly less hard on myself.

There’s such a mixed message with failure. It can be interpreted as not being prepared or being capable. You slipped up with or without intention. And there will be consequences. Sometimes devastating. Then there’s the upside of failure – becoming more self-aware, getting clarity and focus, discovery of a new path. For me, the stuff that you’re either not able to see until you fail – reveals itself. We encourage kids and young people to fail. Famous psychologists, authors and celebrities wax on about how wonderful an experience it can be to fail. Everybody fails. Right. So why does it seem like false victory? Whatever your interpretation, it didn’t go as planned.

Failure, like loneliness, are often perceived as unwanted.

Immediately following the moments after the most abrupt end of my relationship with my fiance, it felt like a poisonous failure. After the years of being love bombed, then put down, followed by being fully and utterly blamed for every single thing, mood and situation, then threatened, and finally thrown away like trash and turned against – I had shreds of self-confidence left. Like the shreds of the carpet fibers I pressed by face into while laying on the floor wanting to die. Succeed (or not).

“Heartache is not something we choose to invite in,” Pema Chodron says. “Our feeling that we have a lot to lose is rooted in fear – of loneliness, of change, of anything that can’t be resolved, of non-existence. Relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of unresolved moments of our lives.”

I’m in these breathtaking mountains, tucked away in the woods with a bunch of genuinely warm people, and it is serene. And while I relax with loneliness and failure, I can see that I’ve already circled back to the “start.”