Fear of failure. Fear of disappointment. We know them well. They can keep us from making important changes, from standing up for ourselves and others, from pursuing work/travel/hobbies that really speak to us. But Mark Nepo offers a wise way to meet the fears of "not getting what we want" in his beautiful book Seven Thousand Ways to Listen:
We are taught early on that to have ambition and to work toward it is how we contribute to the world and move ahead. In and of itself, this is true. But along the way, we often incubate a self-centeredness that breeds like bacteria in the dark corners of our psyches and something else happens. We begin to associate getting what we want with success and not getting what we want with failure. We begin to expect that we can will things to happen, that we have some right to control events. We are deemed skillful if we can steer people without their knowledge. Soon we wake with a sense of entitlement: that we have a right to have things go our way; a right to get what we want; a right to steer people and events toward our will.
Of course, life has other things to say about all this. Sooner or later, everyone will face not getting what they want. How we respond to this unavoidable moment determines how much peace or agitation we will have in our lives. This is the moment that opens all others, for our acceptance of things as they are and not as we would have them allows us to find our place in the stream of life. Free of our entitlements, we can discover that we are small fish in the stream and go about our business of finding the current.
This deeper chance to shed our willfulness does not preclude our sadness and disappointment that things aren't going the way we had imagined. But when we stay angry and resentful at how life unfolds beyond our will, we refuse the gifts of being a humble part in the inscrutable Whole. (...)
When we can stop blaming others or nature or God for not getting what we want and be honest about what this inevitable rearrangement does to us, then humility and compassion are possible. (...)
Eventually we are asked to undo the story we have been told about life - or the story we have told ourselves - so we might drop freshly into life. For under all of our attempts to script our lives, life itself cannot be scripted.
This passage brought two important things to light for me:
- I have, in fact, spent most of my life believing that I could will things to happen. It sounds ridiculous and laughable when I put that down on paper, but it's true. The acknowledgment and release of that belief is nothing short of liberating. I can hold myself responsible for my actions, but that is where my responsibility ends. Life involves multiple parties, and after I do my part, I've got to let the rest go.
- I believed that life could be scripted. Theoretically I understood that things could change in an instant - that I could lose someone I loved, that I could fall ill. Nevertheless, I harbored a misguided belief that if I lived my life in a certain manner, I had a right to a particular kind of life - a scripted life.
And I don't think I'm alone.
We often experience failure as a form of punishment - as if we should have been able to secure our desired outcome if only we had done X,Y, and Z. But when outcomes involve others' cooperation (individuals or organizations), it's important to understand what lies outside of our sphere of influence. And surrender.