I have a really, really hard time letting go of mistakes or failures, perceived or actual. A prison of my own making? Sign me up, and for the long haul!
But while feeling trapped or limited by shortcomings and past choices has long been my oh-so-cozy comfort zone, in recent years I’ve rebelled against this so-called comfort, chipping away bit by bit, trying to bust out of this cell.
I believe it’s called “growing”.
Funny how when we think of growth, it sounds so healthy. Commendable. Smooth.
My reality is far from that. Growth is a messy, hair-raising, rocky ride across a violently tempestuous sea of self-doubt and darkness, punctuated only occasionally with bursts of light from a distant lighthouse.
There’s a phrase I came across sometime ago: know better, do better. It stuck with me because it invited me to follow that light. It gave me a way to look beyond my mistakes and failures; it gave me permission to step out of the prison cell, using the key I was holding all along.
Life is messy and we all make mistakes; the best way to move through it is to get better at moving through it.
When things fall apart, when consequences of our choices overwhelm us, or no good choices exist, we need to confront the brutal facts of our current reality. Otherwise known as ‘hard times’.
It’s tempting, in the midst of hard times, to wish for the past, for things to be the way they were, for the difficulties to simply disappear. But they don’t. And therein lies the terror of facing said reality.
And yet, somehow, you survive. And when things are a little bit better, you perhaps make some time and space to look back, and reflect.
What hard times do is deeper than simply offer us an opportunity to know better. They crack us open to learn things we were refusing to learn. They force us to open our eyes to see things we need to but were not willing to see.
If we choose to open our eyes, and keep them open, we learn, we grow, we become wiser.
Wisdom is the land between naivete and bitterness.
To be naive is to keep our eyes shut, either out of ignorance or denial. Bitterness is opening our eyes but giving up hope and abdicating responsibility.
The problem with bitterness is that it’s a hollow, dark way to live. And while being naive has a certain romantic aura, it has a short shelf life and doesn’t help us grow.
Looking back at my biggest failures, the best gift from those experiences wasn’t the lessons I learned, but the awareness that I needed to learn them. Failures wake you up.
If we are looking for a shred of meaning or purpose or depth to our life, we won’t find it muddling through our days half asleep or with blinders on.
Whether we know it or not, it is growth that we seek, because it is from that we derive meaning, purpose and depth.
Because when we grow, we know better, and we do better.
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