It is okay to be a failure. It has to be 'cause at one time or another it befalls all of us. I intend the word "failure" here as a noun, as who you are, not forever but fully so in the moment. I had a day like that yesterday. Who knows what really brings that failure feeling on sometimes? It can be a real event, in real time or it could well be the ghost of feelings long submerged.

Other folks throughout time have also witnessed the "rightness" of failure. I quote, "It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." It was surely written by someone who felt like a failure that day. The quote, so apt, also hints at risks taken and a life fully lived despite the fear of failure.

The poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran must have been thinking upon the same lines when he wrote "Your joy is your sorrow unmasked." In our "either/or" world, success would be the other side of failure. The modern psyche mimics this mentality with diseases of the mind like bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia. Choice and change become demons of the polarized mind rather than life-enhancing possibilities. Have you ever known someone so frightened of making the wrong choice and being seen as a failure their minds are quite literally paralyzed by fear?

As an artist and claymaker I have experienced "fear of finishing" over and over ad nauseam in my work. It always starts with a great idea, inspired choices and then the impasse.

The little demon of the mind says, "What if it's not good enough?" "What if no one wants to BUY it?" "What if THEY laugh at you?"

And so the pieces with the greatest potential sometimes linger and gather dust and then cobwebs and are thrown out because you can't remember what you ever saw in them to begin with. Some of my relationships have gone that way, too, as a matter of fact.

We can view these aborted missions of the soul as our inability to follow through, lack of focus or a truly motivational behavioral problem, OR we can see them as opportunities to heal the gap in our psyches. Success and failure fall upon a continuum rather than being opposites or enemies. Holistic thinking repairs the damages done to our minds exposed primarily to a dogmatic polarized world view. You know the one I am talking about: the black/white, good/bad, right/wrong, them/us, war/peace, yes/ no and most important, life/death world the national "news" feeds us daily.

Our discerning, discriminating, rational, intelligent minds are blended shades of gray, or more aptly, ALL the colors of the rainbow without absolute need to choose one OR the other. We all "know" this and it is a battle within the psyche to "keep it simple." Keep it simple enough to ALWAYS know the good guys from the bad guys, right from wrong and the best next stock choice. Otherwise, face failure. In that context it seems like not so "bad" a choice after all.