Beyond the Fears of Failure

It's not difficult to fail. Most of us at one time or another in our lives have felt the sting of failure. It's a pain that we feel for a long time.

When we think about failure, we understand that failure is not preplanned. In other words, we don't consciously plan to create situations that cause us to fail.

Whenever we plan for something, we do so with expectations of accomplishing our goals. We create goals to make us feel good about ourselves. And we feel good when we achieve them, and not so good when we don't.

 Nevertheless, many of us never achieve the success we planned for, or in many instances, dreamt. And whenever we don't achieve our dreams, we question our abilities to make it in life. These questions or doubts are responsible for our failures.

Let's face it, most of us feel badly whenever we fail to accomplish our goals. We want so very much to feel noticed by others because of our accomplishments.

Unfortunately, our need for recognition only plunges us deeper into the abyss of failure. The more we try to keep up or compete with others, the more failures we create in our lives. Sometimes we create failures and believe they are successes.

Some of us have never done much in this world to even be noticed by people outside of our families and friends. Our obituaries highlight our mediocrity or, in the case of most of us, our failures.

It's unfortunate, but most of our failures exist because of our reluctance to examine our beliefs and values. We are afraid of what's in our minds. We don't want to face the beliefs and values responsible for our mediocrity. 

While we eschew beliefs of mediocrity or anonymity, most of our beliefs and values produce these results in our lives. And when we realize our minds are adrift in a sea of mediocrity, we become afraid of ourselves. We don't like what we see.

A little clarity goes a long way in assisting us with understanding our relationship with mediocrity and anonymity. And whether we like it or not, while we travel unnoticed on invisible vessels of failure, we must not allow ourselves to drown in the sea of life.

Similarly, we must be willing to admit to ourselves that deep inside of us is a burning desire to be great, successful, even powerful icons for others to aspire. And this unfulfilled desire is greater than  the vacuous platitudes coming from those whom we expect to say them.

At the core of our being, we want people to know we're alive, and proud of who we are. And we want them to know we're greater than their judgments of us.

Nevertheless, most of us must change our attitudes or the way we think about ourselves. We must stop condemning ourselves for our perceived mistakes or failures.

Unfortunately, whenever we condemn ourselves for not measuring up to others' expectations of us, we cripple our minds with illusions of failure. In other words, we condemn ourselves for being ourselves.

Yet with a little clarity, we can clearly understand that success and failure are judgments we use to define our actions, and compare ourselves to others.   We must remain mindful that enlightened minds cannot comprehend failure.

Powers of mind or enlightenment is nothing more than seeing ourselves without the distortions coming from our beliefs and values. And without the distortions, we can clearly see ourselves with the power to overcome our beliefs and values.

Meanwhile, regardless of our present conditions -- unemployment, poverty, obesity, addiction, avarice, insatiable cupidity, so forth -- we are successful whenever we accept ourselves as such. The mind games begin and end in our individual minds.

The mind has the power to go beyond what we have been taught by others.