Fail

What If You Don’t Feel A Connection?

Have you ever turned the house upside down looking for something that was right in front of you? You go through every drawer in your closet hunting desperately for your watch only to look down after 15 minutes of frantic scrambling and see that you have been wearing it the whole time. Similarly, you might have searched everywhere for your keys which you did not notice were the only thing on the table by the door.

This same phenomenon can occur with angels. You might be desperately searching for some angelic assistance, but you have completely ignored the signs and suggestions that the angels in your life have left you.

If you’re expecting a talking hologram to appear and talk to you for an extended amount of time, it’s not going to happen. Especially at first, the contact may be brief and more of a feeling than visual or audio.

If you cannot seem to find an answer or any help, pause and look around you to see what answers might be sitting right in front of you. Pray for clear sight so that you can see what signs the angels have left you, and if that fails, ask your angels to be overwhelmingly obvious. Sometimes, you need a neon sign instead of the subtleties that angels tend to use.

It can take days, weeks even months to receive an answer you fully understand. And sometimes, the answer comes through an event or moment of sudden insight. It may come to you unexpectedly during a casual phone call from a friend, something you read in a book, newspaper or magazine, from a conversation between strangers you inadvertently overheard. The main thing is to be aware and open.

Sometimes your angels appear to have abandoned you because they are waiting for you to try and solve the problem yourself. This is not something that anyone enjoys, but even angels practice tough love on those occasions that you really need a kick in the pants.

Do not think that this means the angels have abandoned you to flounder helplessly. Even when your angels are making you solve something yourself, you are not alone. They are there with you and will help you if you truly need it. They will not, however, complete the task for you. If you feel like you are sinking, know that the angels will keep your head above water. They will not let you drown, but you are responsible for swimming to shore.

If you can tell that your angels are present and listening but they seem to be holding back on open assistance, it might be a sign that this is a problem you need to face down yourself.

Patience will allow you to persevere, even if you do not get results right away. Patience will help you build faith in your Angels, trusting that at the right time they will come through. Faith endears you to your unseen supporters, as well as creating the space for miracles, which is where they gather and thrive.

Miracles do not have to be earth shattering. Miracles can be tiny happenings in your daily life that make you feel good or that make you laugh or even cry from happiness.

Also, be on the look out for a tendency to discount the ordinary things that might happen to be helpful to you. Angels often work in ordinary ways and through ordinary people and events.

Source: Belief.net

So It’s A Fail!

As I was putting this project together, I came across a fair amount of “fail” memes, which are fun! Not sure exactly why we think its hilarious to watch other people fail, but it is. Maybe because we’re so glad that’s not us, maybe because it’s a huge relief to know we’re not the only idiots out there!

Anyway, I was feeling a little disappointed in the singular lack of participation in this project. I expected to be the only one here, and yet there was a small part of me hoping for at least one or two more… And that’s ok. I’ve learned a lot over the course of the project, which was the whole point of doing it in the first place. I can settle for being the only active participant.

So today I thought I’d post a tiny little gallery of fails. Something fun to cheer me up, let me know that I’m not the only idiot out there. And if you have stumbled into this post, or if you have been silently following along, here’s something to make you smile. Enjoy!

Failed Perfection

“Ever tried. Ever failed.
No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” 

What can we learn from failure? A great deal. The objects in this section (of the Less Than Perfect Exhibition) are, mainly, failures. Most failed at the time of production. They were victims of inadequate preparation, random gusts of wind, or a careless slip of the hand.

For many, production flaws rendered them unusable and they were discarded. For others, the flaws mattered far less. Coins could still be exchanged even if their main image was off center. Warped ushabti figures could still accompany the dead.

  • Did ancient artisans see beauty in failure?
  • Or—more likely—did they grumble when they realized their hard work had not yielded its desired results?

Whichever the case, failures led artists and craftspeople to make new discoveries, improve production techniques, and gain better control over raw materials, tools, and facilities.

Archaeologists also learn from studying imperfect objects. Failed objects capture a moment when things did not go as planned. They allow us to witness ancient experiments, track technological innovations, and understand acceptable loss in early mass production. They let us see the products of learners and skilled and less skilled laborers. And, sometimes, their failed perfection yields charm, humor, and great beauty.

From: Less Than Perfect – Failed Perfection

A Fresh Start?

According to Oliver Burkeman, there’s no such thing as a fresh start. Yes! He says exactly that in his Imperfectionist Newsletter. He also says, and I quote, “You have already failed.”

Say what?

The unspoken hope is that you won’t just change a few things for the better, but make a total break with the past. You’ll reboot your life, leave disorganization and procrastination behind you once and for all, and do everything differently from now on….

He goes on to say:

I’ve only more recently grasped the deeper point here, which isn’t simply that fresh starts don’t work as intended, but that there never are any fresh starts in the first place. Contrary to self-help cliché, the thing we perfectionists need to learn isn’t that we’re probably going to experience failure. It’s that we’ve already failed, totally and irredeemably.

This is liable to sound incredibly depressing, but since it’s actually fantastic news, I hope you’ll allow me to elaborate.

Behind our more strenuous attempts at personal change, there’s almost always the desire for a feeling of control. We want to lever ourselves into a position of dominance over our lives, so that we might finally feel secure and in charge, and no longer so vulnerable to events. But whichever way you look at it, this kind of control is an illusion. It implies the ability to somehow stand back from or get outside of your life – which you never can, obviously, because you just are your life.

What this means, for one thing, is that the perfectionist’s fantasy of reaching her deathbed with a perfect record of accomplishments under her belt isn’t just extremely unlikely, but doomed from the start, because (to mix metaphors) the years she’s already lived are water under the bridge. All the time you’ve already wasted, the people you’ve disappointed, the opportunities you failed to seize – it’s all already happened, and can never be undone.

It also means that the person attempting to leave the past behind, by making a fresh start, is one who’s been completely shaped by that past. The self you’re seeking to transform is the same one that’s doing the transforming – so you’re like Baron Munchausen, trying to pull himself out of the swamp by yanking on his own hair. You can never start life afresh, because you’re hopelessly stuck in this life; there’s no breaking through to another one in which everything’s different and better.

The reason this is so liberating, for anyone with even a hint of perfectionism, is that it means you get to give up on the exhausting struggle to take charge of your life, so as to steer it in a new direction. You get to abandon all hope of one day finding the perfect time management system – or perfect relationship, job, neighborhood, etcetera – and relax back into the inescapable chaos and muddle of the one you have.

And then – once you’re facing your real situation, not fixating on a fantasy alternative – you suddenly find yourself able to start making a few concrete improvements, here and now, unburdened by any need for those improvements to usher in a golden age of perfection. This, in my experience, is the only way personal change ever really happens: by first seeing that it’s always a matter of rebuilding the ship mid-ocean, making adjustments to a life you can’t ever take back to port or trade for another.

The American Zen teacher John Tarrant says, “freedom, waking up and fearlessness come down to the simplicity of ‘Wait a minute, what if this is it?'” When I hear such exhortations to live in the moment, the fresh-start addict in me is quite capable of turning them into perfectionistic plans, too: “From tomorrow morning, I’ll meditate every single day, and become the kind of person who lives in the moment!” But Tarrant’s point isn’t that you should live in the moment tomorrow. It’s that this is it, right now, with all its odious imperfections – the tasks that remain unaddressed, the messes that haven’t been cleared up, the enormous personality flaws that still haven’t been corrected. And it’s the only place I can ever hope to get anything meaningful done.

Ok so…

This kind of reminds me of that last charge in Lord of the Rings where Theoden King of the Rohirrim, charges down the hill in an impossible doomed to failure battle with an incredibly huge and vicious army or orcs, monsters, and bad guys of all shapes and sizes. And of course, my life isn’t any where near that dramatic or epic … most days anyway…

In years past, I might have imagined myself charging down that hill to battle my demons, my obstacles, my mistakes and misdeeds, my faults, flaws, and failures… But today, I’m looking at things a little differently. I’m thinking, “What if…”

What if, here I am, with my army at my back. My very own army of all of my good qualities, along with my many mistakes, faults, flaws, regrets, remorse, guilt, shame, mishaps, misdeeds, failures, and all the other imperfect and messy parts of me that make me human… and we’re charging down that hill to tackle the next big thing… totally unprepared… not even at all sure what we could possibly be battling…

I love this new vision…

Oh and by the way

If you haven’t seen the Lord of the Rings, or read the books, here’s a quote and a video:

“The end will not be long,” said the King, “but I will not end here, taken like an old badger in a trap. … When dawn comes, I will bid men sound Helm’s horn, and I will ride forth. Will you ride with me then, son of Arathorn? Maybe we shall cleave a road, or make such an end as will be worth a song, if any be left to sing of us hereafter.”

So now I’m feeling empowered and ready to take on the world… or at least that tiny little part of it that I think of as mine. How about you?

Messy and Imperfect

Our next project is due to begin in less than a week, and I’m still not sure what I’m going to call it or how exactly I’m planning to organize it. So it’s already a mess, and right here, right now, I’m thinking I might call it:

Life Is Messy, Imperfect And Probably A Fail But Time Is Running Out So Just Carry On And Do What Seems Best In The Moment

Actually, I think that’s pretty much the the basic premise behind this project. My idea for this project sprang from a piece of an interview Oliver Burkeman. I only heard part of the interview, but it made a huge impression on me.

What he basically said was that life is really really short. Ok, I already knew that. He went on to say that we might as well start by admitting defeat.

Here’s what I came away with:

  • Failure is an inevitable part of being human and that a person could choose what to fail at.
  • You can settle for less, it’s just a matter of choosing what this might be.

It was like a load I was carrying was suddenly released! Yes! I can fail at keeping my house clean and clutter free. I can absolutely settle for and even expect to have a sink full of dishes and clutter in the dining room. My website doesn’t have to have a gazillion readers nor does it have to be “finished!”  And actually, the website will always be a work in progress, and now that’s ok.

The things I’ve been carrying around and beating myself up for found a nice little spot in my “It’s fine if I fail here” basket. And as soon as I did that, I began to discover what it was that was really important to me, those things that I am not and will never be willing to fail at.

One of the things I discovered was that being there for my family was really important to me. No matter what, I will always be there for them. I might fail at fixing their problems, I might fail at understanding them. I might not know what to say or do, but I will not fail at being there for them.

I can settle for having a dozens of art projects in various stages of disarray and incompleteness. If I don’t finish every picture, painting, or mosaic… that’s fine. My art is a work in progress that will never be completely done. This means that I can throw my whole self into whatever has my creative juices flowing without beating myself up for not finishing this that or the other.

When I was in middle school, my one goal in life was to know every thing there is to know about everything there is. Eventually this turned into wanting to know everything there is to know about dogs, reiki, herbs, magick, art, life, motherhood, the Gods… and yes… ridiculously impossible. I’m letting that one go too. Instead I’m going to settle for learning as much as I can learn about whatever it is that I am interested in right now in this moment.

He also made a point that the future we imagine when we’ve become our most self-actualized, accomplished selves, with inboxes empty and goals achieved, is a fun-house mirror that keeps us separate from our real lives.

His book is called 4000 Weeks because if you live to be 80 years old, that’s how many weeks you have. I did the math… and even if I had 4000 more weeks, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to complete the 1001 things on the “to do, to know, and to be” lists that I continually beat myself up with.

And as for this project? In the past, I’ve had to struggle with delusions of grandeur and expectations of brilliant success and the idea that dozens, if not hundreds of people will somehow find out about it and then join in. Today, I’m absolutely sure I will fail at going viral and that’s fine with me. My website probably couldn’t handle that much traffic anyway. I’m happy to settle for simply getting this project up and running.

So how will the project work?

My plan is that we will begin on January 1st. I haven’t read the book yet so I thought I’d pick pieces and parts from what I’ve found and collected so far and share my own thoughts and ideas about them. Also, I’m thinking I will look around for bits and pieces from different sources so that we aren’t exploring just one opinion.

One of those pieces is Wabi-sabi, the Japanese art of imperfection, which goes along with the idea of becoming an imperfectionist and giving up on my goal of achieving perfection in everything I do. This was another thing Oliver Burkeman mentioned in the interview.

I’m totally in love with Imperfectionism, especially when it comes to art, and I do have an art project idea that I’m going to throw into the mix at some point. That doesn’t mean I won’t try to make everything perfect, it just means that I won’t beat myself up when I inevitably fail.

What else? Oh! If you happen to be reading this and think you might want to join in, YAY! We can do it together. If you just want to dip in every now and then and watch the chaos unfold… that’s fun too!

To stay informed whenever something new posts, you can subscribe via email, there’s a link to Feedburner in the sidebar, or if you’re on your phone or other device, it might be at the bottom of the page.  If you don’t do email anymore, you can like and follow our Facebook page.

Feel free to comment. I love it when people leave a comment on something I’ve written. And also, know that you can join in at any time, you don’t have to worry if you aren’t up for the whole 30 days… hit and miss is perfectly fine, and actually it’s how most of us have worked these projects over the years.

The painting, by the way, is by Alex Levin.

An Imperfect Idea

We just completed this project, and I thought it might be good to also share where the idea came from. So I’ve back dated it to the day it was actually written, and here it is:

Here’s where the idea came from:

I was driving home the other day and happened to hear a piece of an interview with an author of a self-help book about time management. At first I was kind of rolling my eyes a little bit because the whole concept of time management eludes me.

I love my “to do” lists, but I almost never actually DO them. I really enjoy creating new daily and weekly routines, which I can’t ever seem to follow for more than a day or two. I also spend inordinate amounts of time trolling Facebook, playing games on my phone, and surfing YouTube. In other words, I fail miserably at time management, and yet, I do seem to get quite a bit of stuff done.

So there I was, rolling my eyes and thinking about how I hate time management advice because I never succeed with it, and then he said something to the effect that we can’t possibly do everything we want to do.. My ears perked up and I said, “What?”

And then he said that we can’t possibly be everything we want to be either. Failure is inevitable, and we might as well come to terms with it.

He went on to say that instead of picking what we want to succeed at, it might be good to look at what we are willing to fail at because failure is going to happen, and it’s simply up to us to choose what that might look like. For example, a person might be willing to fail at housework… in order to put more time and energy into something else.

So then he had my full attention. I fail at housework every day! I fail at housework in order to try to succeed with art, family stuff, and the inevitable distractions of YouTube, Facebook, and Google. He also talked a little bit about how it’s perfectly ok to “settle for less.”

There was more to the interview, but I was so taken with his ideas that I don’t even remember what else he actually said. Here’s what I came away with:

  • Failure is an inevitable part of being human and that a person could choose what to fail at.
  • You can settle for less, it’s just a matter of choosing what this might be.

It was like a load I was carrying was suddenly released! Yes! I can fail at keeping my house clean and clutter free. I can absolutely settle for and even expect to have a sink full of dishes and clutter in the dining room. My website doesn’t have to have a gazillion readers nor does it have to be “finished!”  And actually, the website will always be a work in progress, and now that’s ok.

The things I’ve been carrying around and beating myself up for found a nice little spot in my “It’s fine if I fail here” basket. And as soon as I did that, I began to discover what it was that was really important to me, those things that I am not and will never be willing to fail at.

For Example:

One of the things I discovered was that being there for my family was really important to me. No matter what, I will always be there for them. I might fail at fixing their problems, I might fail at understanding them. I might not know what to say or do, but I will not fail at being there for them.

Also, I can settle for having a dozens of art projects in various stages of disarray and incompleteness. If I don’t finish every picture, painting, or mosaic… that’s fine. My art is a work in progress that will never be completely done. This means that I can throw my whole self into whatever has my creative juices flowing without beating myself up for not finishing this that or the other.

And as for this project? In the past, I’ve had to struggle with delusions of grandeur and expectations of brilliant success and the idea that dozens, if not hundreds of people will somehow find out about it and then join in. Today, I’m absolutely sure I will fail at going viral and that’s fine with me. My website probably couldn’t handle that much traffic anyway. I’m happy to settle for simply getting this project up and running. I am, however, not willing to fail at posting and sharing this particular project.

What’s Next?

I have to come up with a name and a theme for the project. If anyone has any ideas, I’m open to suggestion. My current ideas include:

  • It’s A Fail
  • Settling For Imperfection
  • Time Management For Imperfect People Who Suck At It

Oh, and if you want to do some preliminary research, I’m going to talk about the author, his book, and his newsletter here pretty soon. When I get that written up and posted, I’ll put a link to it here. And I did get a preliminary post finished and published, here’s a link: Messy and Imperfect.

But, hey, it’s Christmas Eve! I’ve got family stuff to do, so I’m going to leave you hanging for a little bit while I hang out with them.

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