Why It’s Good When It Doesn’t Work Out
You’re waiting for that text. Refreshing your email. Filled with the hope that what you’ve been applying yourself towards is going to pay off. And then it doesn’t work out. A pit opens in your stomach. The air in your body wheezes out like a tire with a nail in it. You are left deflated, with the emotional profile of a wet cat.
Do you know this feeling? Sure you do. We all experience it. It’s the worst. But if we look more deeply at what happens when things don’t work out, we can discover not only how to lighten the heaviness of these moments, but why they are useful.
For starters, we know this feeling because we are trying. And that’s a good sign. We’re trying to improve our lives by working towards better opportunities and relationships. Sometimes things work out the way we want. Sometimes they don’t.
Disappointments happen. But the fact that we have life pulsing inside of us, swirling with a hunger for personal evolution, grounded in the knowledge that higher levels are possible, is a very good thing. It means that not only are our bodies alive but so are our spirits.
It took lots of repetition (re: things not working out for me over and over and over) before I started applying a mindful lens to these tough moments. Even though I’d studied and practiced mindfulness for years, when big moves that I had high hopes for didn’t deliver, it always dumped me into an emotional landfill.
Thankfully, as my inner practice started paying off and my mindful awareness became sturdy, these letdowns stopped phasing me as much. This allowed me to look at them from a larger perspective. When I started doing that, I had a breakthrough that’s served me to this day. Sign up for the course at the bottom of this email and I’ll tell you what it was. Kidddding haha.
The breakthrough was that I realized when things didn’t work out how I wanted, it made me think in a new way that wouldn’t have been possible without the bump in the road. Every single time the shift in thinking, even though it sucked in the short term, led to something bigger, better, and more fruitful than I was initially aiming for.
I was on the grind for years making rather eccentric ambient music, hoping it would let me communicate my ideas through sound while building a public career. Oh, boy was I wrong! At the time, few people listened to that kind of music and I kept banging my head against the wall and getting nowhere. Until one day, there was a particularly pathetic response to an album release I had put my heart and soul into (The Source, if you’re interested).
Instead of getting sucked into a swamp of disappointment. I slowed down, considered the big picture, and thought about what I was actually trying to do with music and why I was doing it. It hit me that I was going about my goal wrong. Why was I trying to express ideas through sound instead of language? That’s when I realized I should start a podcast. The rest, as they say, is history.
It was because of something not working out that I got the idea for the thing that blasted my career into action. The key was that instead of getting pulled into the drama of the moment, I was calm, thoughtful, and looked at my future with curiosity instead of entitled resentment.
Keeping a calm, open, and curious perspective during these times will serve you well in multiple ways. For one, it will help you stay emotionally balanced and free of attachment. This will help you remember that one blip on the path isn’t the end of the world and will prevent your enthusiasm from taking a nosedive.
Another useful thing about leaning into your mindful awareness when things don’t work out is that it will help you take advantage of the fresh creative thoughts your mind automatically generates in response to the feeling of your plan getting a little banged up.
I know this may feel a little counterintuitive at first. But once you practice responding instead of reacting to things not working out (big and small), I promise you will find that the real wisdom of your future path rarely lives on the surface.
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