Failure as Pedagogy

A quick and healthy reminder that social media only offers a curated view of each others' lives. Someone commented to me the other day that my life seems "xyz" which caught me off guard before I remembered we hadn't actually seen each other in real life for a few years and that their perception was based solely on my posts. In real life, I have been navigating the painful lessons of what it means to fail at something I put my entire heart and soul into, something that was perhaps too ambitious and something that I need more time and experience to grow into. In my haste, I placed my trust in untrustworthy people, I made quick choices from a place of unearned confidence, I overestimated my ability to predict the terrain in uncharted territory. I was so seduced by the vision that I lost sight of the next step, and naively believed that people who extolled their values in public and also lived by them in private were more common than not... so although this feeling is both lonely and unpleasant, I know that quite often what is understood as failure is actually growth and redirection... life goes on.

Last weekend I stripped the paint off of this canvas I had been working on for years but never completed. I never got it quite right, as evidenced by the layers of paint where I tried to perfect the same spots over and over and over again. Even with a fresh coat of gesso, I can still see the ghostly shapes of the old image, but I think that's a good thing. Even though it didn't turn out the way I had intended, I don't want to completely erase what I learned through the process.

The quintessentially human process of creation is divine expression of our godself. The interpretation of the product is subjective.

Give thanks.