How to Fail With Intent

This segment is Part 4 of the series trying to get better when things are getting worse, but it is also a standalone piece on failure as well. You may have noticed I have quoted from Josie George’s work recently a few times, and most recently I pointed you to her very beautiful piece Imbolc.

I do this purposefully because I believe there are rare individuals in our world who somehow embody substantive potential and opportunity through failure. They do so better than most and that we can learn from them. I believe that Josie George is one such teacher. Another, sadly gone from us now, was Nadia Chaudhri.

We often point to denizens of industry and the megazillionaires of our world as the embodiment potential and opportunity, but they embody vampirism and the exhaustion of resources, people, and all life and therefore they really represent depletion.

I do not believe that you must be ill or dying in order to embody – as in bring into your body and feel it in your body – potential and opportunity. To embody these things, you learn to integrate failure.

Facing serious and limiting chronic illnesses and/or a terminal illness are failures of a living system that are thoroughly non-negotiable, and yet still there are plenty of individuals facing chronic and terminal illnesses who do not find their way to any space of potential and opportunity.

All brains are good at limiting interaction with their own failure and yet interestingly there is much in the brain that is designed to pay some significant attention to failure. Rubbernecking (compulsively staring at something emotionally relevant) is particularly common when driving by a car accident on the road. We pay attention to everyone else’s failures as social primates. We are just as likely to rubberneck to look at someone in a vehicle pulled over by police as we are to look at a car accident—even though everyone by the side of the road is likely unknown to us. Our primate brains identify that these individuals have made a mistake and we are drawn to look for as much information as we can because we want to avoid any and all mistakes. We look to avoid not just the mistakes that may immediately risk our lives but also the ones that may risk our status in the hierarchy. Inclusion in the group for social primates is also necessary for survival. Strong emotional connections are made to witnessing failure because any failure could be either a physical and/or social existential threat.

For all that such strong emotional connections are in place to identify and look at failure, few of us learn to integrate failure. There are two basic emotional response buckets to failure: empathy or judgment. Depending on our personality traits and family of origin, we might have the same strong emotions whether others fail or we do, or we might have one set of vivid emotions when others fail and a distinct set of emotions when we fail.

It is telling that failure does not have its own definition; it is the negative or white space on a page. Failure is defined as the absence or lack of success. But every good designer knows that if you do not integrate the negative space in your design, then you hobble the positive space and the design is not everything it could be.

Failure is absolutely filled with so much more than an absence of success. What is your failure space? Pain, scorn, derision, rejection, anger, despair, judgment, abandonment, chaos…Or perhaps it is concern, care, empathy, kindness, sympathy, forgiveness, softness, gentleness…Failure is a space in its own right and it is filled with emotions. Strong emotions.

I once believed that integrating failure only involved changing up the emotions from harshness towards kindness. Being able to forgive our own failures and be kind to ourselves when we fail is certainly an important first step in integrating failure in our lives, but it is only the first step.

Failure, as the white space that it is, should not be limited by emotion (harsh or kind). To integrate failure into the design of your life, extending my analogy a bit further, you must engage curiosity and critical thinking. 

You might be able to recall a few movies or books where there is a description of the main character traveling to, or arriving in, some non-descript, blank, white, or light space. It is often a space in which the main character is perhaps travelling between life and death and this is the way-station where they must decide to return to life or travel on to death. More commonly, this blank or liminal space is designed to have the character make a choice by aligning their feelings and thoughts and subsequently solidifying their intent. In the Matrix movies this space is called the Construct. You can find a list of examples here that have these liminal spaces.

Failure is a liminal space. The integration of failure is certainly choosing the emotions, yes, but ultimately it is the process of aligning, solidifying, deciding and acting.  Failure with intent.         

Next week we will be back in the thick of Part Five of the main series on how to get better when things are getting worse.