Failing can be a valuable experience
By Nathan Gunter
Student Columnist

> February 1, 2001

I remember a me who was once afraid to fail. I remember a me who scrounged and crawled, who would swim upstream through a river of crap to be the very best there was to be, to be flawless and perfect because that’s what you’re supposed to be. The best.

I remember hearing once that I was supposed to have my life all together. That if I wanted to be respected, that if I wanted to have a good life, I had to “have it all together.” I remember I never questioned what that meant, I just looked to the people who I thought had it all together and tried to imitate them.

I remember once I fell on my face. And I remember that it felt so good. I remember trying to have it all together, and realizing that I couldn’t both have it together and move at the same time. Imagine loading your life up with everything in it and trying to walk around and actually get somewhere.
That’s how we’re taught to live our lives, it seems. We go to a university that we got into on the sheer power of our “having it all together.” Of being great at pretty much everything on some level. Of knowing what we want and how to get it, and really believing that doing that is going to somehow make us happy.

I remember once I fell on my face. All the pieces of my life that I had been closely clutching to myself, that had been teetering perilously in a huge pile as I tried to walk, they went everywhere. And as I lay there, face to the ground, nose bloodied and tears welling up, I realized what a relief it would be to let all those pieces go where they may. Life was just too heavy for me to try to carry alone.

I failed. But I didn’t die.

For some reason, we fear failure. We fear that if we can’t do what we’re supposed to do, or even worse, what we want to do, somehow our lives are over. All those unfulfilled desires, all those unlived moments.

Failure can be the best thing for us. Failure takes those pieces, those dreams and those desires, and scatters them to the wind. I remember once I fell on my face. And I had no choice but to let them sail off into the blue. And for the first time in a long, long time, I was able to stand in life without trying to balance, without bending backwards to make sure one piece didn’t topple the whole stack. I spread my arms wide and let the sun shine on me and realized there is a whole world outside my desires, my dreams, my fears – my success.

Be willing to fail. You won’t be free until you liberate yourself from the worst slave driver you could ever work for – yourself. Freedom comes in being willing and able to try something that might go totally pear-shaped.