An unexploded shell

A couple years ago I was leafing through one of my favorite gift buying catalogs and I saw a paperweight with the engraving What would you do if you knew you could not fail? What would I do with my life if I knew there was no failure involved, I thought.

Possibly many of you have had the experience of reading something and a little grouping of words; maybe a sentence or maybe just a phrase, seems to suddenly be lit in neon and flashing at your eyes saying pay attention! This message is for you! So it happened to me with the words on that paperweight - I didn't even need to purchase it to remember the message for it was etched in the back of my mind. The 'back of my mind' however is where the words had landed and so it wasn't as though I was thinking about the words all the time however, on a regular basis I would be reminded of the message I had received and would ponder what it meant to me.

I think one reason the words caught my attention was because the idea of 'what would you do if ....?' is rarely attached to a personal restriction that we ourselves have complete control over changing. Often the question we play around with regarding unmet dreams is 'what would you do if you were suddenly gifted with a million dollars?" Attaching a large sum of money to the question does two things to our thinking when we play with the answer. First of all, very few of us have much chance of suddenly being gifted with a million dollars and so right away, we know as we play with spending the money that this is a fantasy diversion and we will never actually have to follow through with any action. The second aspect of the question when attached to some outlandish amount of money is the idea that we will spend the money by buying or purchasing stuff: new house, new car, vacation house, trip to where ever or we will buy ourselves security by carefully investing the bulk of our play money. The closest we usually get in answering the 'what would you do if ..." question and perhaps exploring unmet dreams is sort of attached to the idea that if I had a million dollars then I would have freedom to ..... - again, fill in the blank.

However the question on the paperweight wasn't attached to a sum of money that would enable me to do what I dreamed of having or owning, instead, the words asked me to explore my fear of failing. The truth of life is that it is absolutely, 100 percent impossible to follow a dream without some aspect of failing. How can I make such an assertion with a '100 percent' value attached to being correct? Because a 'dream' or a 'vision' of what might be possible with your life is a very, very big concept when preceded by a question posing 'doing' that is taking action and the 'doings' of following a vision will always involve lots and lots of new learning.

New learning always involves doing and thinking in ways that are not yet known and so the great majority of us, personally I think that majority is 'all', are going to have some failures while we learn. This is also why the great majority of people I run into in my life really haven't tried learning something big enough to fail at in a very, very long time but rather just keep adding 'bits' of vaguely new onto what they are already familiar with doing.

This fear of doing something so big that I might fail is why I chose the the image for today: a tight, as yet unfurled, bloom. When I saw the picture it reminded me of the day I was working with the dictionary and looked up the word 'live' as in 'to exist' and came across another definition of the word that applies when the 'i' in the word is pronounced differently and that word means an unexploded shell. Since what I had in mind when I was reading the definition of live was how we persons go about living, when I read 'an unexploded shell' I thought: so many of our lives are just unexploded shells.

By 'unexploded shells' I mean that our personal dreams are generally tight like the bud on the tree: we clutch ourselves, holding deeply inside the 'dream' of what our life might be if only we had been willing to risk failure. By the time I looked up the definition of live, I had been living a life that risked failure on about 19 different levels and in many ways I give that picture of the paperweight in the catalog credit for shaking loose some of my own fear because the message I read had me mulling not only what I might 'do' but also what failure was for me.

Being afraid of failing when the definition is limited to non-risky activities is not really a bid deal because all of us (yes, a full 100 percent) have made mistakes and failed at trying to do something. Oddly, what always pops into my mind when I am on that topic is failing my driving test 3 times because I absolutely could not get the hang of parallel parking which I found immensely frustrating and embarrassing and to my mind was a 'big' failure because it took 3 separate tries to succeed. Clearly I was as yet young to think that was a big failure for what I discovered as I got older was the real trick to succeeding after failing to learn something new was knowing that what I really needed to change was my perception of what I was doing: new learning almost always requires new perceptions and new thinking. Both new perception and new thinking is often difficult as we get older because of the real definition of failure.

There are two definitions of failure and the first is one we are all familiar with not succeeding in what was attempted, it is the second definition that I learned as I mulled on the message what would you do if you knew you would not fail? because I realized it was what kept me clutched tightly in a bud. The second definition of failure is to be shown as lacking. If emotionally we respond to 'being shown as lacking' as simply what it means: we lack an ability or skill or information, then failing at what we are trying is not a big deal because we receive the message that we need to go and get something else: knowledge, skill or ability in order to succeed.

However, 'being shown as lacking' when attached to our ego needs: our social status, our career image, our life role image as partner, spouse or parent and/or our social successfulness; what we own and who we associate with, involves true risk. A great many of us are unwilling to risk the possibility of loosing, that is failing - being shown as lacking - in any arenas of living that involve deliberately sacrificing our ego needs. And yet, there is almost no way possible in life to live a dream or follow a vision without having to sacrifice something the ego values.

The very idea of sacrificing a value held in esteem by our ego generally clutches at our gut. In fact our 'gut reaction' to the idea of sacrificing an ego-value is generally so swift and sure that our whole being contracts against the very notion with a very emphatic 'no' and then we usually follow up our no with a whole bunch of rationalizations. This 'gut reaction' is so swift and sure when responding to the possibility of giving up an ego-value because we have practiced this response endlessly, or from childhood anyway, and so we are awfully dog-gone good at our gut reaction of 'no way Jose' - no way will I look silly, foolish, ignorant or ...'

We have this well practiced gut-response to the notion of 'being shown as lacking' because our gut is attached to the ego whose job it has been to rigorously defend us against being 'wrong' or more accurately, 'appearing' wrong since we became aware of the world's reaction to 'being or appearing wrong.' The phrase 'the world's reaction' actually just refers to the authority figures of our life and so our ego that defends us against appearing to be deficit or lacking in any way responds anytime our personal criteria for appearing to lack what is needed is awakened. For the great majority of us who formed our ego defenses during childhood this generally applies to situations where 'being wrong' meant 'losing face' and experiencing shame with an authority figure.

Shame is an awesomely powerful feeling. I use the word awesomely because generally shame works so well that it needs to only be applied once to a situation to keep us from repeating the actions of that situation. Shame is guilt on steroids: guilt tells us that we made a mistake and did something wrong but shame takes guilt to the nth degree and tells us that 'our being' is wrong.

Shame therefore always touches into pure survival instinct since our 'being' involves our right to exist and so our sense of "I" is emotionally at risk. I'm going to make a broad generalization in the next statement yet the words are based in my own experience of living as well as years of working with people and their fears: most people will not deliberately put their sense of "I am" at risk.

Most people will not put their sense of I am at risk: I am competent, I am caring, I am successful, I am unselfish, I am intelligent, I am hard-working, I am 'the best', simply because most people are only vaguely aware that those "I ams" are not the true you. But they are very, very powerful 'faces' we present to the world and since my 'face' is me, the 'faces' you see in how I interact, must also be me. Well, not exactly. Not unless you have managed to come to grips with the interactions of your ego's survival needs and how those impact the 'faces' you wear and as a result, how true your faces are with your essential self. The tasks I just described is one I talked about in Nesting Selves and Two Kinds of Ego personally, I began round 3 or 4 of those tasks as I mulled on the question on the paperweight: what would I do if I knew I would not fail.

The answer I came up with after mulling on the paperweight question was: I would write my book. The longer I mulled on this I realized that the true answer was: I would write a book and have it published. The reason I knew the second answer was the correct answer was 'published' revealed my fear of showing I was 'lacking' in some way because writing a book to be published meant not only risking the possibility of being rejected and not published, (rejected = lacking) it also meant that the fear of 'what if' it were published and didn't sell (not selling = lacking.) That fear, led directly to the next fear which was 'what if the book were published and people thought it was dumb? (ridicule=rejection) Which led to the next fear; 'what if I published my book and people didn't like me anymore because of what I said in the book? (personal rejection=lacking)

Now I knew exactly what I would do if there was no fear of failure - being SEEN very publicly as lacking.

After exploring those ideas I asked myself another question: so having looked at these fears, what would true failure be for you? The answer was: to not write and be published. Which then led to the next question: WHY would that be a failure for you? And the answer to that question was: because now that I have awareness of what I believe I am supposed to do and I am aware that the biggest problem is my ego-fears, not doing it would be cowardly.

Truthfully, I'm willing to be all kinds of things but cowardly is not on the list. I have learned by living a few decades that overcoming cowardly simply requires a willingness to move forward one little, but deliberately brave little step, at a time. Fortunately, thirty some years ago I was gifted with a Program for Living that taught me that the first and only step needed to move out of fear was a 'willingness to be willing.' See those lovely two words 'to be': I didn't even need to be willing I only needed to be willing to be willing. Which is actually a wonderful mind-game because being willing to be willing only happens if you are willing each day and so being willing to be willing, if done deliberately, creates an attitude and habit of willingness. Sounds convoluted but absolutely works if you hold an specific intention before you and say that you ARE willing to be willing and ask only for the strength and courage needed for that day. That's all you have to do to change the fear that is clutching the tree bud so tightly.

The Spirit of Life is really quite gracious in my experience for rarely do we need to do anything more than by taking one step at a time. I'll admit there was quite a bit of time between the initial reading of the question on the paperweight and my first book that was sent back as 'not meeting their needs at the moment.' I took many, many baby steps to get to the place of sending my children's book out into the world, but guess what? When it was returned, I did not feel 'lacking' and I did not feel rejected. Know why? I did not feel like a failure because by the time it was returned, the Universe had blessed me so graciously and magnificently with manifestations of support for what I was doing, my response was gratitude for the opportunity to try again. Doesn't mean that I don't get scared doing what could mean failure of some sort; ego's do not ever completely give up, but a lot of the old fears are gone.

The biggest change is that I have discovered while living a life that 'risks' losing face quite regularly is that 'losing face' is not terminal. Besides, writing something new several times a week means facing the fear of the blank computer screen and that's scary. But I do it anyway. I've also discovered that that old wives tale about the Universe being supportive of our dreams when we are willing to risk our ego in order to follow them is true and Goethe was right: whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin. For there is genius, power and magic in beginning.