If you do not touch this fire,
If you do not seek to touch this fire
With a fire that burns to burn
Even in the cold
Even when the light itself is cold
As the distant stars,
Then how can you find the heart
To let this fire into your hearth
And feed it nothing till it dies?
Yet even in fading to a smudge
And passing on to stillness,
This silent dying of the light
Burned like a fire
That will never be forgotten


                ~~~

When we fail, it is easy to take the attitude that everything we did was totally wrong. This attitude lacks understanding. If we try to bake a cake and mess up in one important way, the cake will be a failure. But that doesn’t mean that we did everything wrong. It would be foolish to think that being a successful baker meant perfectly mixing each particle of flour, sugar, baking soda, every drop of egg, vanilla extract, etc. individually. But that’s what we tend to think when we feel guilty about failing. We act like the thing we were supposed to do was infinite. Realizing this, we can feel free from our burden. But when we reconsider the sadness of an untasteful cake, we feel ashamed and the cycle repeats. So what is it that makes us self-loathe when we fail? When we self-loathe about our performance (or when we anally ridicule someone else’s performance) we aren’t really being honest. There may have been only one or two mistakes that ruined a whole cake. But the whole process of baking was not bad in itself. It just wasn’t cohesive with creating the desired end result. The steps to being successful are easier than we would fear and less predictable than we would expect. (Not to mention that our standards for success may be way off from what is actually lifegiving and good.) Our failure is not infinite even if our end result is has gone in a totally different direction from our intended target. It’s easy to respond to failure with guilt and anxiety, and this isn’t bad in itself. Where that guilt and anxiety turn sour is when we believe that the antidote to failure is either infinite effort or giving up altogether. No, our desire to succeed and perform well is valuable and natural. The thing that is wrong is the idea that failure is total failure. This idea keeps us from focusing on how to actually succeed. It inclines us to coddle people with happy lies or slam our opponents with incendiary half-truths. Turning to honesty and integrity is a way of releasing the shame and corrosion of fantastical performance ideals. If we learn how to bake through success and failure, we can have our cake and eat it too. But if we strive to never fail, we will achieve hard things while hating ourselves or give up hopeless.