Failing by Succeeding

June 18, 2014
          Day 49/365

It was a warm Friday morning in the summer of 1993, and I was on a "Young Brothers Trip" to the Cloisters Museum in Fort Tryon Park, in upper Manhattan. 

We walked around the grounds, filled with artifacts and even whole buildings brought over from old monasteries in Europe.  Very quickly, my soul was transported to another amazing reality as I looked all around me.  I could almost envision the monks walking around praying, and as a new monk myself, my mind was filled with happy thoughts of what my own monastic life would entail.

But like something out of a high school movie (I was still just 18), everything stopped, as I realized the older priest in our group was asking me a question.  I came out of my daydream and saw everyone just staring at me, judging me for not paying attention. 

I had been in a state of contemplation and awe, a mindful meditation space happening to me and through me, but because I failed to hear this priest's question, I was made to feel as if I'd failed in some way.  There was a definite sense of judgment from the others, one I came to know all too well in several other occasions over those years.  For succeeding in being monk-like, in allowing my soul to tap into a higher presence, a more devout mind space, I came across like a failure through my inability to pay attention.

It was not an actual failure on my part, just a very real success cloaked in the appearance of failure.  It was an embarrassing moment in my life I still remember quite well, and yet it also continues to inspire much more than shame me.  It inspires me to strive for cultural failure, to always be the counter-cultural person I was taught in the monastery to be.  It inspires me to be mindful of the invisible world all around me, much more so than the visible one taking place in a trillion little movements every second of the day.  And most importantly, it inspires me to redefine success and failure in my own personal way.

We succeed in our own time, our own methods, our own way, not in the ways others do.  We walk our own path, not the one others walk on.  And we cannot let others make us feel like failures for succeeding differently.  Sometimes we even seem to fail by succeeding, but it's still an absolute success whether others see it that way or not. 

No matter which way the various paths all stray, we all end up in the same place, and the gardens of life are worth appreciating from all angles.