One day I went to visit a group of friends in Italy who live in a spiritual community in the countryside, partly detached from the city and society as a whole.
I was chatting with one of them about the reasons that led him to choose his lifestyle and he said something that struck me: “Yesterday I saw the F1 on TV…In sports, just like everything else in society, all that matters is finishing first, second or third. It looks like if you don’t finish first, second or third… you’re a fool. But in life, you can also finish last…”.
I’ve mulled over that line and what failure means in our society. And I’ve concluded that we’re terrified by failure. And we’re in constant denial.
The employee who loses his job must pretend he’s left by choice, because he “was looking for new challenges”, he “wanted to keep growing”, out of fear that the recruiter would reject him if he knew that he was fired, even when that wasn’t his fault.
On the internet you see thousands of people who launch their business with net profits that are the equivalent of an avocado on toast and a Frappuccino, but they constantly hype their nothing. Perhaps they pay for an economy flight out of their own pocket to give a presentation in Doha and on social media they portray it as international expansion. Instead of just saying: “I took risk and followed a dream. It’s not working out unfortunately. If you can, please support me. Thanks”.
Some people even hide their illnesses and handicaps, which are not their fault, just because these things undermine their image of strength, vitality and power. And then there’s those who can’t even maintain the relationship with someone who gets ill, because they feel uncomfortable with this situation of failure and crisis. But it’s a situation that ultimately hits everyone: the failure of our body. Our body, just like an enterprise, is born, grows, reaches a peak and eventually collapses.
Even in fields like music, which could spread only joy, communion, truth and harmony, we have introduced competition. We have created TV shows such as X-Factor, where you must come out on top to win a deal with the label. So, even in the arts we have introduced the category of victory, which inevitably carries along that of defeat and failure. But why not let it be only creation and beauty?
We are afraid to fail, to miss the target, the quarterly results, we’re afraid to accept ultimate defeat, with no re-match, no judge we can appeal to, no consolation prize.
Even when we talk about failure, it’s always a failure finalized to a subsequent victory.
Motivational gurus have indoctrinated us for ages about Edison who failed a thousand times only to become what he has ultimately become. We’re presented failure as a teacher, as a feedback, only so that we can win again later. There must always be the promise of the ultimate triumph to make it sound more appealing.
Nonetheless, in life there’s also failure with full stop. The kind of failure we don’t even want to take into consideration.
But there’s a quote that says: “when life gets you down on your knees, you’re in the perfect position to pray”.
Because failure also strips us of the inessential. It forces us into silence, where we can listen to the voice of our soul, after being distracted for so long with medals, prizes and shiny objects.
If frees us from the burden of our own ambitions, to make room only for what truly matters. To make us restart from what we honestly love, because it’s only with the power of love that we can get back up, not with the power of ambition, envy, competition or complacency.
when life gets you down on your knees, you’re in the perfect position to pray
Even Steve Jobs was booted out of the company he’d founded and – at his lowest point – rediscovered the authentic love for just doing his work at his very core, independently of all successes, and subsequently entered one of the most creative phases of his life, during which he gave birth to companies like Pixar and NeXT.
But even if we fell down to our knees and weren’t able to ever get back to where we came from, in the end what would it matter for?
What truly matters is that even without any medal or award, we’re all on a heroic journey: losing everyone we love, accepting the wasting away of our body, the eventual dissipation of all beauty and power, the fleeting nature of every instant. And we’re here to learn that in the end, just to give ourselves a little love and compassion, we don’t need to finish first, second or third. Yes, we can also finish last.
