How To Make Mistakes or: Failure Is Always An Option

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Transcript

How To Make A Mistake Properly or: Failure Is Always An Option

shaykh ibrahim ansari

Why do we make mistakes?

Perhaps one of their purposes is to teach us something.

Everything we have today went through thousands of trials and experiments - all to no effect. The light bulb, for example, needed to have a filament that could pass electricity and shine without burning. Edison and his large team of inventors spent months failing over and over again to find the right combination of filament, bulb and the right amount of electricity to achieve what we use today around the world and in this room.

Their persistence and patience pushed back the night. Now there is more light everywhere  - especially where it is needed, as in hospitals, libraries and streets.

Anything you use, look at, ride or read took someone doing it over and over to correct the mistakes. 

Nothing great was ever achieved or created perfectly the first time. It takes huge amounts of time, sweat, tears, frustration and several dark nights of the soul to create something worthwhile and pleasing or useful.

To err is human. To learn from that error takes a little more  work: the ability to perfect something is a process. It is important to fail frequently. It keeps us humble, increases our capacity for patience, and helps get us out of the way so we do not interfere with clear observation. Behind the scenes there is a 'cooking' occurring that is burning away what you are not. But, if you fail to learn from the error, then you must repeat the experiment and this time try to get the meaning of the failure. 

The purpose behind all this struggle is to get to know yourself better. The choices you make during one of these wrestling matches shapes who you are becoming. 

To learn is to make mistakes, so that we are able to gather information about how something works and maybe how to improve it and ourself. We know so very little about everything, and the more we learn the more we realize we knew even less than we thought before.

If something has been damaged in the process of making the blunder, it is always a good idea to apologize and see if it can be mended or repaired -whether it is a thing or a relationship. There is no need to defend a mistake. It wastes everyone’s time and energy. A confession is almost always good manners.

Life is certainly filled with tangles and unsolvable dilemmas. There are some who approach this life as might a scientist. There are mysteries everywhere we look. Our curiosity impels us to want to solve these oddities. Perhaps we might come to an understanding of how to navigate more efficiently through the various obstacles and problems, rather than be overwhelmed by their enormity and persistence.

Imagine that we are in a massive, fantastic instructional facility. The first thing that needs to happen is the cooking within, burning away the inefficient garbage interfering with what you need to learn. The impediments getting in the way are your reactions, emotions, biases, conditioning and adaptations that don't belong to the true you.

The best way to deal with the junk is to see it for what it is, and to let it burn it away in the furnace of truth. This is the initial process of cooking.

And now for the radical new idea: what if there are no 'negative' emotions? What if anger, guilt, shame, desire, etc. are all just bloody indicators, like on a pilot's dashboard. They just indicate data points that you may act on or not. You're the pilot. If you are on a journey, you don't need to respond to every gust or cross wind. You want to get safely to your destination. If you respond to all the little fluctuations of life, you will never get anywhere, you'll be circling the airport you took off from twenty years ago.

Maybe we call them negative because we just don't like them. Embarrassment, fear, panic, confusion... they are definitely hard to swallow. The idea here is not to waste the moment or the purpose of the data. They are part of our panel of teaching devices, continuously relaying information - if you know how to read them. Instead of ignoring it, let us approach this display valuing the information, learning to understand what and why they are telling us.

Let's take a look at the fear meter. Imagine it is reading fairly high. What is happening to you now? You are starting a new job, and you want to appear proficient, cool, smart - as if you know what you are doing. But there is a younger part of you who remembers being the new student in a fifth year class and how it felt like an out-of-body experience. You could hear their whispers and giggles. And now, every time you start something new, that same feeling of panic and fear pins the meters. Your heart accelerates, your breathing - well, you forget to breathe, and you feel like you are going to puke, pass out, or run out of the room screaming.

Because you have not dealt effectively with this pattern, it has sunk deeper over time as your neuron wiring locks it down as a 'you-pattern'. You now think that 'this is just who I am'. If you want to excise and erase this unpleasant loop, you will need to first witness it in action, and then make the intention consciously and clearly that you want to deal with it, so you do not have to go through this nightmare again. You then decide what is the best and most efficient modality to get on the other side of fear.

The panic and unpleasantness is a kind of pain. And Pain is one of our basic teachers. It tells us, usually, NO. What a great motivator! That is the job of all the feelings and emotions. They are neither positive nor negative. When the meter is pinned, it means something needs to be activated so you don't do it again. Maybe if we paused for a moment and reflected what is the reality of the pain. Maybe it is trying to help us. It is just notifying you. BUT, we people are very weird about some feelings. If we define our self as being prone to panic attacks, or don't really want to deal with it (sometimes because we have become accustomed to it because it gives us a kind of homey comfortability), then we sabotage the actual repair work needed. Because of these factors, it remains active, waiting in the wings to jump on you once again.

Part of the problem is that we judge the emotions from some kind of unpleasantness grading grid. Learning and growing require you to screw up. If you accept the mistake, you can grow and be a better person. So a better method might be to learn how to make better mistakes, with more of an open mind about what you need to learn. 

Psychologists might call this repair work ‘therapy’, others 'the essence of alchemy', or the basis of Sufism. The name does not matter. The truth is, that we are pummeled about as we grow up, then come out of it in our twenties dizzy and confused. We imagine (and hope) that everything told us Is The Proper Way. 

But then there comes the time we question what we have been told and we have to ask ourselves - so who am I, really? 

So we learn how to learn from the mistake. Then it was worthwhile both in time and experience. However, if you do not learn from the error, then maybe that is what we would call… a failure.