Wisdom Through Failure

• Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure. (William Saroyan)
• Good judgment is built, brick by brick, from painful lessons learned. (Believing in Myself, a daily meditation book)
• Judgment comes from experience and great judgment comes form bad experience. (Senator Bob Packwood)
• Perseverance generates prosperity, and the lack of it engenders poverty. They say the black ogress called Misfortune lurks in laziness, while Goddess Fortune lingers in the laboring toils of active men. (Tirukaral 62:616–617)

The place where we can most directly open to the mystery of life is in what we don’t do well, in the places of our struggles and vulnerability. These places always require surrender and letting go: when we let ourselves become vulnerable, new things can be born in us. In risking the unknown we gain a sense of life itself. And most remarkably, that which we have sought is often just here, buried under the problem and the weakness itself.

When difficulties arise, we project our frustration onto them as if it were the rain, the children, the world outside that was the source of our discomfort. We imagine that we can change the world and then be happy. But it is not by moving the rocks that we find happiness and awakening, but by transforming our relationship to them. (Jack Kornfield, A Path With Heart)