Freedom to Fail

It’s been a long time since I shared a “Quotables” post. But I came across a quote this week that reminded me of another quotable I wrote on years ago, about failure. That old post was about the incisive power of “what would you do if you knew you could not fail?” to clarify what you really wanted to do. The quote I came across this week is – rather than what would you do if you could not fail, it should be what if you were free to fail.

“When you’ve been found, you’re free to fail.”

• On the Road with St. Augustine, James K.A. Smith

When you’re young, life is more about you trying to make choices about what you want to do, and that must’ve drawn me to the old quote years ago. Maybe I’m drawn to this new quote more now as I’m older and navigating the result of my own and other people’s failures. Here’s the full quote in context (and a heads up, it’s a religious quote):

“Resting in the love of God doesn’t squelch ambition; it fuels it with a different fire. I don’t have to strive to get God to love me; rather, because God loves me unconditionally, I’m free to take risks and launch out into the deep. I’m released to aspire to use my gifts in gratitude, caught up in God’s mission for the sake of the world. When you’ve been found, you’re free to fail.”

I think whether or not you’re religious you can connect to the need to be free to fail. Whether or not you understand the idea of resting in the love of God, it makes sense to long for rest, to seek the peace that comes with your fire and ambition being accepted even if objectively they never amount to much.

Humans judge on achievements. Humans can’t help but compare. We compare each other, and we compare ourselves to each other, and in the age of social media it doesn’t take long to see how much we lack in comparison to everyone else.

But if life is about about we produce, what we show, whether we’ve made good on the promise or potential we showed at one point, how can we ever find peace?

What would you do if you knew you could not fail is for young people deciding what to do with their lives. They’re making decisions about paths to take. They’re trying to diagnose their passions.

What if you’re free to fail is for when you get a little older. It’s for those days when you’re dealing with the knowledge you have failed at various things. You DID fail. What does that mean? How do you handle it?

And this is not about a failure you can learn from. It’s not the kind of “failing so you can do better next time.” Not the kind of failing that life coaches advise you is good for you (“fail fast and fail hard!”). No, this is the kind of failing that seems completely futile, that seems to have no meaning and no lesson to learn. The kind of failure that can crush you and make you too paralyzed to do anything more.

You need the promise you’re accepted no matter what.

More than that, you need the hope that life is not futility. That your failures don’t mean life is futile. That doing things does have meaning. Putting one foot in front of the other does matter on a cosmic level, even if you can’t see the point.

Anyway, that’s why I’m sharing this Quotable today.