Enlightened Success: what are your successful failures?

I am just old enough to remember Apollo 13. My mother sitting on the edge of my bed, my hands pressed together for nighttime prayers, asking God to keep the astronauts stuck ‘up there’ safe and to bring them back to earth. And then watching their return on the television.

Now, Apollo 13 is one of my favourite films. I am fascinated by the Apollo missions and moon landings anyway, but the story of the Apollo 13 team, who never made it to the moon, has richness beyond the excitement of exploring further than man had ever explored before.

The mission was dubbed a ‘successful failure.’ Clearly, the goal was not reached, because the goal was to land on the moon. That goal was abandoned as soon as everyone realised there was something wrong with the spacecraft. And because the damage had occurred on lift off, it became obvious that the mission’s success, in the traditional sense of the word, had been doomed from the start.

The gravity of the situation was not fully appreciated when the famous, ‘Houston, we have a problem,’ line was uttered, but unfolded gradually. Once everyone realised that there was a serious issue, the goal of reaching the moon was replaced with the goal of getting the crew home.

When the three men finally did return unharmed, there was much jubilation. The success of the ‘successful failure’ was celebrated even more fervently than a successful trip to the moon and back would have been.

The stakes had been as high as they could have been and everyone worked together to make the seemingly impossible happen. It wasn’t what they had originally wanted, but the new goal became far more important than the old one.

Thinking about failure and success, I pondered on the successful failures in my own life.

My legal career has been quieter and far less spectacular than I might have hoped, but I have faciliated my son’s home education while practising part time.

Wide-ranging and unwanted family difficulties have inspired my work on worry and thinking less and as a result I have written a book and now teach Mind Calm meditation.

There are also the smaller, more everyday occurrences when we have to change course, alter our plans and ‘make the best’ of what has happened. We always have a choice: see it as goal setting gone wrong, or a failure, or decide that our willingness to change plans and our commitment to a different course illustrate depth of character and adaptability and call the eventual outcome a success.

If we look at things this way, we will all find that our lives are packed with ‘successful failures.’ Marriages that were supposed to work, but didn’t, but were followed by new relationships, blended families or the unexpectedly joyful freedom of single life. College courses that didn’t work out but gave way to interesting jobs. Homes we thought we were supposed to live in, projects we felt were destined for success, ideas that seemed so important.

The key is to suspend judgment: maybe it’s not so bad, maybe what happens instead will be a different kind of success. And to let go of attachment. If we are too attached to a particular outcome, too desperate for something to happen, we find it very difficult to alter course. And that can make things very hard for us.

So, we might work really hard for our stated goal, but if and when we realise it’s not going to happen, we need to let go lightly and be willing to see things a different way. It’s not the end of the world (in fact nothing ever has been, as we are still here!) and life has adventures and opportunities in store for you that you can’t even dream of.

Being willing to suspend judgment and letting go help us to embrace the new, unexpected route to a different kind of success, perhaps our very own ‘successful failure.’

The issues of judgment and attachment are a key part of Mind Calm theory. If you would like to know more, check out my Mind Calm Meditation workshops here or contact me for more information.