Failure:  The condition or fact of not achieving the desired end or ends: the failure of an experiment. 2. One that fails: a failure at one’s career. (freedictionary.com)

Confession:  My “A Student” voice has ruled my roost for almost all of my 63 years.  She is the one who whispers:  “Don’t try that – it’s not something you’re already good at.”  You can see how that might close things down a bit.

She’s the one who wants to line her ducks up in a row and then precisely knock each one over in her own time and in her own way achieving her “desired end.”  She believes that there is a right answer for everything.  She learned this in school.  When she supplied the right answer, she got an A or a 100 score and lots of accolades from her parents.  Which she really really wanted.

Somehow she has failed to notice that parents are long gone, and before they were long gone most of the rest of the inner voices were not in sync with wanting to please them anymore.

Tight clinger she.

This year, however, I have pried her loose.  And I’m sending her off to play with The Hamster who hasn’t been heard from in months.  That is a very good thing.

Living in my question for the year – Is who you are being in sync with who you are? – I discover that who I am being has been somewhat muted by what will they think.  I guarantee you people who know me will argue with this.  But it’s true. 

I think: I could do something about that (pick any number of things screaming across the headlines these days).  Then I think:  It will take too much time.  The other problem is that, listening to outsiders, I have been keeping the personal separate from the political in order to run my business “professionally” as recommended by – well, just about everyone.

This is what happens when you start living in your question.  All creativity breaks loose.  Some might say all hell breaks loose but I beg to differ.

I have begun to play again with my art.  It is not only about business, it is about allowing myself to fail at creating something that is lovely or saleable or replicable or all of those.  Not only are new lines being born that please me silly, but they also lend themselves easily to workshops and kits.

I learned to handle my WordPress site better, and to create new ones from my favorite WordPress Maven, The Savvy VA (if you want her contact info, email me at info@TammyVitale.com.  She’s very busy but I would be happy to do email introductions).  In the past, A Student would have tied me up in knots about not being technical.  And, in fact, when I claimed “Hey, I’m a techie” and then had to have husband come help me with transferring files to a disc both A Student and Hubby noted I had just mentioned being a techie and here I was failing at transferring files.  Both were summarily backed off.  I am a Techie.  And tech stuff being what it is, there’s always more to learn.  Here I am:  ready, willing and able!

I set up a new WebSite   all on my own (mostly, SavvyVA did have to help a bit)….not such a big thing.  Here’s the big thing:  I HAD NO IDEA what I was going to do with it.  A Student thinks that’s failure right off the bat.  But she was SO wrong!  I played with the first few posts.  I held the space for it to tell me where it needed to go.  And it did!  This is along the lines of “Trust the process,” a phrase that still rings in my mind from getting my Master’s at wild and wooly Goddard College in Vermont.  A process that flies in the face of everything A Student every learned to believe and act on.  And it works.

I, finally, started my newsletter.    Again, having no idea whatsoever where it was going.  And still it’s going, and well.  As soon as I created a space for it, the energy moved in and took over.  This is NOT magic!

There’s so much more, but attention span being short, I’ll leave you with these thoughts (most of which aren’t new and all of which need to be repeated out loud so we don’t forget):

1.  If you aren’t failing at anything, you aren’t trying anything new.  You’re playing it safe.

2.  Playing it safe will feel comfortable until you wake up (or are startled awake by something the ever generous Universe sends your way) and start paying attention to the fact that you’re being pinched and scraped and bruised daily and have numbed yourself out to it.

3.  You came here for a reason.  Are you living your reason?  Have you even bothered to think about what your reason really is?  Not the one that will make you money, the one that makes your heart sing, and gets you out of the bed every morning with a “Hell YES!  Can’t wait to meet this day!”

4. Can you tell me, without thinking hard, 5 things you’ve failed at in the past six months?  (and New Year’s resolutions don’t count).

5.  We don’t begin.  We reason there’s a better time, we need more money, someone else can do it better.  Maybe yes to all that.  But maybe they’re waiting  just as we are and so nothing changes because none of us will just face the fact that tho we might fail, we might also create the space where the next person, riding on the energy that comes through, succeeds.  We owe that to the world (see 3 above).

6.  If you don’t begin, you can’t finish.  You haven’t lost because you haven’t run.  But you ARE lost. 

Ready, Set, GO!  Fail at something.  You just might find yourself along the way.

Wylde Women’s Wisdom

Reality is a cipher with many solutions, all of them the right ones.  Iris Murdoch