In a recent coaching group, a friend asked me, "What have you failed at, recently, Tom?" I named some lame venture and he came back at me with, "No, really! Give us something you'd put your heart and soul into!"
Some of you know that I am called to strategic mischief-making with a commitment to reverence for all concerned. Some of you know because we're partners in that high holy venture. In that moment, there was no strategic in me. I was on the spot. There was impatience in the air and 14 of my peers were waiting. It was time to tease my own soul out into the open!
As I began to relate my recent tangle with personal failure, I stepped into that scary space of sharing something so close to my heart that I'd begun imagining the experience as unique to me. What I saw instead was nodding. What I heard was affirmation. What I felt growing in me was a renewed commitment to fail even more boldly in the pursuit of discerning where the Spirit's life and joy show up.
Why do I forget this, and so readily? On average, babies fall down 300 times before their first unassisted step. On average, babies fall another 350 times before they first run. What do we remember?
The first step.
(By the way, have you ever seen a baby blush because she just fell?)
What would it be like if parents started filming every one of the 300 prerequisite falls? Can you imagine handing your adult child about to go out into the world a video record of all the slips, tumbles, crashes, slides, collisions and stumbles they took before their very first step? Maybe it would sound something like, "Here you go! This is a video tribute to your incredible persistence at learning through failure. Keep it up!"
NO, I mean really!
