Anam Cara

Sweet Honey from Old Failures

Suffering makes us deeply aware of our own inability. It takes away our power; we lose control. The light of our eyes can see nothing. Now it is only the inner light in the eye of the soul that can help you to travel this sudden, foreign landscape. Here we slowly come to a new understanding of failure. We do not like to fail. We are uncomfortable in looking back on our old failures. Yet failure is often the place where suffering has left the most special gifts. I remember some time ago speaking to a friend who was celebrating his fiftieth birthday. He told me that this milestone made him reflect deeply on his life. He was surprised and excited on looking back at his life to discover that much of what he had understood as the successes in his life did not hold their substance under more critical reflection. As against that, what he had always termed his failures now began to seem ever more interesting and substantial. The places of failure had been the real points of change and growth.

This is often true in our own experience. Sometimes a person puts his heart and soul into his career. He makes huge sacrifices, putting his family in second place. Then, when the key position becomes available, someone else walks into it. At the crucial moment, through no fault of his own, he has failed, and the opening will not come again. Initially, this is a devastating experience. Finding understanding and support in the bosom of his family, he slowly begins to see through his life. He is shocked to realize that he hardly knows his family at all; he has been absent so much. As his withdrawal from the drug of career becomes surer, he sees things differently. The failure could not actually have come at a better time. If this had not happened now, his grown-up children would have left home without his really knowing them. This experience of discovery often happens when people retire or are made redundant; they learn to reclaim and enjoy the life they never knew they had lost, until retirement. There is a beautiful verse from Antonio Machado:

Last night I dreamed—blessed illusion—

that I had a beehive here

in my heart

and that

the golden bees were making

white combs and sweet honey

from my old failures.

Translated by Robert Bly

Failure is the place where destiny swings against our intentions. What you wanted and worked for never came. Your energy and effort were not enough. Failure also happens in the inner world, the times when your own smallness and limitation ruined things; you reached deep into yourself for something kind or creative and caught only smallness. Failure often gnaws most deeply in the territory of relationships. Times when you have caused damage. Failure also includes personal weakness. This is often a subject that evokes great feeling in literature. This was a theme that haunted Joseph Conrad’s characters in the novels Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Conrad explores failure in the challenging area of affinity. One character sees himself in an other and the other’s failure gnaws at him and threatens to unravel a life built on standards and achievement. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow only catches glimpses of Kurtz, but he already has foreknowledge of his own failure. Failure is then often the place where you suffered unintentionally. Reflection on our failures brings home to us the hidden secrets of our nature. Failure is the place where longing is unexpectedly thwarted. This often brings interesting discovery and reintegration.