resolution – Surprised By Joy

“Never let your failures go to your heart or your successes go to your head.” – unknown

Last Friday, as I sat at my desk trying to will my way through a client problem where my solution wasn’t working (see featured photo), I felt a heaviness settle over me. It was more than a week work of trying to solve a troublesome technical problem, it was the pounding of my sore heart worried about others and the physical discomfort in my body from a UTI and the feeling like everything was stacking up.

I was in a funk. A funk as I typically do them, is usually not observable on the surface but is roiling around just below, making steadiness harder to come by.

As an inveterate “try-er,” I often work right at the edge of my abilities, both personal and professional and say “yes” to whatever comes. While that works for me a lot of the time, I also have to get used to failure and psyching myself up to try again. Sometimes, as was the case last week, multiple failures stack up at the same time and then I feel the gut punch.

My go-to mantra has always been to work harder and try again. I come from a long line of people who jump right up after falling off the horse, ready to get back on. Wallowing about falling off the horse, reviewing the best way to ride the horse or talking about which horse to ride are not allowed – we just jump right back on.

But the older I get, the more I realize that pushing through isn’t always either smart or effective. If I don’t acknowledge the failure or maybe even better said, listen to the learning, before moving on, then I wake at 3am and then watch the highlight reel of my recent failures stream through my head.

Then I have to make peace. I repeat a mantra I learned from a very smart pastor, “My God is bigger than my worries” until my heart settles and I can breathe again. And when calm, I have to find the source of which failure I haven’t yet come to terms with. I lie on my back and focus on the seven Chakras, the Sanskrit word for “disc” or “wheel” which line up with energy centers in our bodies. Starting with the red chakra of my tailbone, I try to identify if I feel safe, then I move to the orange chakra of my pelvis to scan for creativity. Next yellow – solar plexus – power, green – heart – love, blue – throat – communication, indigo – third eye – awareness, purple – top of the head – spirituality.

Somewhere in that scan, I find where exactly I am most troubled and then I can sit with that lesson for enough moments to truly hold it. Even when I don’t yet understand what I’m supposed to learn, I can appreciate that I know where I’m growing.

The pain of failure is not always comfortable. But it’s always instructive and if I don’t want to have to learn the lesson twice, I find I need to sit with it. It’s often kinder than I thought, a signal trying to break through my stubborn insistence to keep moving, trying and problem solving so that it can whisper it’s message, “Listen down deep to where you’ve been opened and find how you can see things differently through the crack. That’s all you have to do and then leave the rest to Me.”

After I spent a few hours with my failures in the middle of Saturday night, I’m happy to report, I solved the client’s problem. More than that, my body is all better too and I lifted the heaviness of heart that came with not spending the time to look.

What do you do when you wake up at 3am?

“Most problems, given enough time and space, will eventually wear themselves out.” – Buddha

Two nights ago my son, 19 months old, woke in the middle of the night crying. It was so unusual that I had to go in to check to see if he was sick or cold, lost his lovey or something else disastrous. And in going in, I found that nothing really was wrong. He’d just woken up so I held him until he got sleepy again and put him back in the crib. So then the next night he awoke around the same time and started crying. Over the course of his learning to sleep, this pattern has happened before. He wakes one night and I check and then for the two nights after, he awakens at the same time. I had no idea he knew how to tell time. But I have learned through trial and error that to stop the pattern, what I need to do on those subsequent nights is let him cry and soothe himself back to sleep.

The discernment of when to leave others alone is tricky. Thinking of the times that it’s been hard – whether it was bugging my mom incessantly for something I wanted to buy when I was a kid or needing resolution from friend or lover in the middle of a kerfuffle, I can feel the tension of those moments. My impulse is to insert myself and push things the way that I want because I can’t stand the internal conflict. Or, I take the opposite approach and walk away entirely, hardening myself against needing at all.

The longer I live the more I am able to sense the Cosmic timing that helps guide us. Like some grand orchestra, I play my instrument but it sounds better when I wait for the cues from the conductor. I can ask for what I need but the response may be in the next movement. Expressing my hurt to a friend is best done when I’m feeling the clarity of my own notes and they might need to tune up before they can reply. Listening to my kids work themselves or their relationship out is like letting them practice their parts, something they’ll never get a chance to do if I step in too quickly.

I don’t like listening to my baby cry for the time it takes him to soothe himself back to sleep. But it makes it easier when I have the music of the Universe ringing in my ears.

Tag: resolution

The Whisper of My Failures

Moving To Our Shared Rhythm