Mis-takes are the road to our soul’s truest expression

How many pots have been turned back into clay as a potter learns their craft?  

Standing behind ourselves, our voice, and our offerings to the world requires the willingness to mess up, even mess up big. We’ve got to play the game, and lose a bunch, in order to gain mastery of the game. From what we might consider our mis-steps or mis-takes come valuable learnings that support us to align closer and closer to our deepest intentions.   More often than not - we are not going to get it “right” the first, second, or even twentieth time.  Our job is to offer to the world what our deepest calling is with the humility to be lifelong apprentices to this very calling.  

My most hard won wisdom has been born from a trail of what we might call failures or mistakes.  We literally can not know what we don’t know - until we do.  So, we try things.  Often I try new things like relationships, jobs, creative endeavors with great aspirations, thinking, what could possibly go wrong?   When I fall short of intended experience, my own or others expectations, or creating the vision of what I know is possible, what arises first is usually grief, frustration, anger, etc. 

And yet, when I can create enough space around the experience to see it as a story unfolding, rather than the defining moment of my worth as a human, I can begin to receive the immense gift embedded in the experience.   Imagine if creation had given up during those 3 billion years of yearning towards building complex life forms.  How many trials and errors had to exist for the multicellular organism to be finally birthed!  

The creative glory of the natural world doesn’t have a human brain saying - “you failed so you may as well give up and stop making a fool of yourself”.  Instead, the force of creation is unstoppable.  The amount of species that have taken off and gained traction pale in comparison to the ones that never gained traction.  And yet, here we are in a world of infinite beauty and diversity, born from an infinitely higher number of trials, mis-takes, and failures! 

So, in learning from how the planet functions, “failure” is an inevitable part of our road to success.  When we take the bold move to try something new, life immediately begins offering feedback.  It may come internally, from deep within.  It may arrive in intense, wildly unexpected, subtle or totally absent responses from the world around us.   In any case, the more that we are a curious recipient of this feedback, the more we are likely to succeed next time.  

I find it to be such a brilliant design, that we actually require feedback from the world around us to be the best version of ourselves.  We are wired differently from other animals whose instincts have encoded them with pretty much all of the information they need to be a fox, bear, or cat.  We are more of a blank slate, highly relational, with an incredibly sensitive and flexible operating system, waiting to be shaped by life around us. 

The gift of learning through mistakes is applicable for each of us as individuals, in partnerships, communities, collective projects we are engaged with, and society.  We can learn as unique individuals, and we can learn together as part of a collective, society, organization or identity group.

Through the grand experiment of life and with much trial and error, we learn, we grow, we refine, and we are shaped.  Don’t give up friends!  Whatever your cause, your passion, your soul’s gift is to this world, believe in it enough to learn from the challenging moments, and let them refine and grow you and your soul’s offerings to be as beautiful, abundant, and powerful as you know they are inside.