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Failure is fluid. When we’re at our best we recognize its impermanence. That’s when we’re at our best though.
I was talking Wednesday with a friend of mine, about to go to market with his book proposal. He’d written proposals before and they hadn’t found a buyer. He and I game-planned how to handle the meetings with editors he’d have next week, one of the last steps before any editor bids on any book proposal.
The subtext of our entire conversation, though was, What if I fail this time?
It’s the scariest question of all. The author Jeff Goins, channeling Thomas Merton, said, “Life is not fixed. Things are always changing. We are either becoming more of our true selves or drifting into a false self.”
I like that. To think of life as something fluid is to take away the fixed end point of failure. If you go after what you want, you can never fail because in pursuing that which is true to you, you abandon Merton’s idea of the false self and walk toward something he would call divine.
Three years ago I wrote a book proposal about the late Senator Daniel Inouye. He’s the most fascinating politician I’d ever come across: someone who saw the bombing of Pearl Harbor from his beachside home; enlisted in the Army despite the terrible racism that…
