I’ve been lucky enough over the past six years to have 5 children born in my immediate neighborhood. I’ve witnessed a lot of natural and exuberant learning and evolution, right in my own back yard. Isn’t it amazing to think that every human being walking around on our planet learned how to walk in the same way: by standing up and falling over, standing up, taking a step and falling over, again and again and again.

Then we start thinking, once we’re a bit older, that our learning should proceed in an entirely different manner. Sometimes it does, but there is still a lot of falling down and getting up that is an essential part of human life. Have you noticed this? Learning to accept this aspect of life as a given and work with it in a good way can release a lot of our suffering. Molly Gordon, a wonderful coach I have worked with, speaks about learning how to “bow to failure.” When we bow to our failures, we look a little deeper than how things first appear. We get curious enough about the nature of life to consider that perhaps failure is not something to be shunned and avoided at all costs. What if our failures bring us something just as valuable as our successes? This has been a big learning for me, and I’d like to share some of it here.

Those of us brought up in a Western culture have been given a worldview, an understanding about life, that is very different from our ancient indigenous cultures. One of these differences lies in our idea of progress. In the West, we tend to think very much in straight lines. Time, life and our own achievements move in a straight line that takes us from where we are to something better. In a post-modern technological culture, we live far removed from the curving, streaming, trembling shapes of nature.  I remember being quite stunned when I realized that there are many people who do not experience life in a linear way at all. In Zen, they talk about life being a great circle. And in India, time does not go from past to future in one long line- it unfolds in enormous cycles that never stop moving and changing.

How does this understanding impact our day to day lives? I feel a space of great freedom begin to open when I envision life moving in cycles instead of lines. In a circle, ‘everything that goes around, comes around.’ Success turns into failure, turns into success. Joy turns into sorrow and back into joy. There are seasons in our lives, just as there are in nature. Nothing really stands still. Everything that I accomplish as a result of my actions is going to change. If it works out well, that will eventually change. If it doesn’t work out, that will change too, just like night turns into day, as the great circle turns.

When we first get a glimpse of all this, it can be very disorienting. We are so used to thinking we can control everything, push the obstacles out of our way, and get to where we want to be.  If we look honestly at our lives we will see the pain and struggle that happens when we believe that kind of control is possible.

How do we live when we really open to the truth of all this? That’s a question each one of us answers with our whole way of being. As human beings, we will continue to feel joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure, contentment and loss.  There is nothing about life that we need to avoid. In fact, there is nothing about life that we really can avoid!  Life is the way it is. If we can really say yes to it, then our way of life becomes one of non-violence, of flowing with the way things are, rather than fighting to change them. It’s an extraordinary thing to actually engage in life wholeheartedly, without holding back, and at the same time, let go of our desperate attachment to unchanging results.

What do you sense about your successes and failures, triumphs and defeats? What would happen if you were to truly bow down to your failures, accept them with love, gratitude, and wonder, as part of the great cycle of life?

Yes is a world
& in this world of
yes, live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds

(eecummings)