The Purpose of Life…

…is to be defeated by greater and greater things….Rainer Maria Rilke

I simply love this quotation. It speaks to me of deep wisdom polished within the tumbles and falls of living. It includes and normalizes defeat as not only being a part of life but as an essential and necessary place that we will all visit from time to time and not because we’ve done something “wrong” but that because we’ve dared to try something new, we’ve stepped outside our comfort zone and risked.

It reminds me of something I heard Brene Brown, the famed vulnerability researcher, mention when she was talking about innovation and creativity at a TED conference- she said that the TED conferences should be renamed the “failure” conference because every single person who was speaking had at some point “failed” but had then carried on regardless.

This acceptance of defeat and failure is a balm for my soul after being soaked in the highly toxic waters of the positivity movement. We won’t always be great, at times we will mess up, say the thing that we wished we hadn’t, wish that we could pull back time but it is in these moments when we are confronted by our very real humanity, by the fact that we’re not perfect that paradoxically we can find an even deeper truth or grace that resides within us. And we can see that defeat was the necessary ingredient required to allow this to be birthed.