Learning to Fall

I'd like to tell you a story this morning, and the story is about monkeys. Many years ago, a psychological experiment took place with what began as a group of 8 monkeys. Placed in a room with only each other and a tall metal pole atop which sat a bunch of bananas - almost immediately monkey number 1 looked up, saw the bananas, climbed to the top of the pole and just as it reached for the fruit it craved cold water sprayed down from the ceiling, stunning poor monkey number 1 and forcing him back down the pole. Several minutes later, monkey number 2 decided to take a crack at it. He looked up, saw the bananas, began his climb and as he made his way up the pole and reached for the bananas there it was again - a cold blast of water stunning him and forcing him back down the pole. This happened several more times until eventually most of the monkeys in the room had attempted the climb and all of them had given up.

Then the experimenters made a change. First they turned off the device that would blast a climbing monkey with cold water. Then they removed monkey number 1 from the room and replaced him with a new monkey. The new monkey immediately looked up, saw the bananas at the top of the pole and began his climb - but before he could get very far, the rest of the monkeys reached up, grabbed him and pulled him down to the floor. He tried again, and again the group pulled him down before he could get anywhere near the bananas, until eventually he gave up.

The experimenters then removed monkey number 2 from the room and replaced him with a new monkey - and like his predecessor before him, this second new monkey immediately looked up, saw the bananas at the top of the pole and began his climb - and before he could get very far the rest of the monkeys grabbed him and pulled him to the floor. Eventually he gave up too.

Over the next few days, the experimenters gradually replaced all of the original monkeys with new monkeys, and each time a new monkey arrived the same scene repeated itself - the new monkey would look up, spot the bananas, attempt the climb, and be pulled down by his peers - over and over again until he gave up. Soon enough all of the original monkeys were gone from the room, and even though none of the monkeys present had experienced the cold blast of water that had frightened the original monkeys - they all worked together to make sure that no one of them would get to the top of the pole and risk getting blasted.

What a great system, some people might say looking at this - proof of the intelligence of monkeys - what with the whole group working together to prevent each other from making proven mistakes- But in reality, there those bananas stood for the taking as the monkeys passed them by, even as they grew in hunger each day, just a short climb away from the sustenance they sought. Though I'd love to deny it, I believe that this story is not so far from our human experience after all - in fact, on some days I might even take it as proof of evolutionary theory. As a people and as a culture, we try our best to steer clear of making mistakes, of possible failure, of the potential for embarrassment - and we try our best to save the people we know and love from those same fates. In our effort to steer clear of failure and mistakes, in our effort to avoid the feelings of insecurity and unease that inevitably comes with risk, many of us unknowingly devote ourselves to lives of slumber, fear and illusion. As our own prophet, Henry David Thoreau, wrote, "Most men live lives of quiet desperation."[1] And so we are - perhaps frittering away our lives with details, with the culturally encouraged quest for more and more - for that elusive sense of financial and emotional security - while all the while the days are passing us by whether we ever try to reach for those darn bananas or not.

This past weekend, as I traveled to and from Colorado to perform an old friend's wedding, I picked up the book, Failing Forward, by Dr. John Maxwell. As a former pastor and current guru in church leadership training and evangelism, Dr. Maxwell has written dozens of books, some under the auspices of groups such as Focus On the Family, but in this book about the value of failure - Dr. Maxwell spoke only of one central premise - that failure is essential to success, and that our human fear of failure keeps us from realizing our true potential personally, professionally, and spiritually. I never thought you'd hear me say it, but I could not agree with him more. I believe we often miss the mark of becoming our highest selves not because we try and fail, but because we never really try at all.

Often, I believe, in our attempts to avoid failure and embarrassment and mistakes we live lives of emotional and spiritual poverty, failing to reach out and risk even when nourishment lies so close at hand. As a perfectionist, as someone who enjoys beauty and a seamless presentation, I know that most of the time I do all that I can to avoid making mistakes. The idea of failing at something completely sets my heart skipping a beat. But here I am, a human being living in this world, and try as I might to avoid failure and mistakes, even when I voluntarily contract my life and my heart to reduce the chance of bad things happening - inevitably it comes - whether it is the darkness of the night or whether it is, as Emily Dickinson writes, one of the larger darknesses, those evenings of the brain - eventually I believe we all enter the darkness, we all experience pain and suffering in our lives, and we all come face to face at some point with our own limitations, mistakes, and failures and those of others.

If failure and mistakes are indeed inevitable, as I believe they are, the question then becomes not whether or not we will fail - but rather how we will choose to fail in our lives. Will we choose to fail by never reaching for the bananas and by holding back our peers as well, or will we choose to fail by risking the possibility of wonder and nourishment, even when we cannot know if it will work out in our favor? Will we face the failures that come our way with bitterness and resentment, shirking all responsibility for our part in things and placing the blame on others, or will we use the wake-up call of failure and disappointment as an opportunity to examine our lives, our selves, and the choices we have made? How can we learn to fall, to fail, in a way that moves us forward towards contentment and growth rather than leaving us stuck in our bitter sadness?

My curiosity about these questions, led me to Philip Simmons, a Unitarian Universalist author who began writing the book Learning to Fall: Blessings from an Imperfect Life, shortly after he was diagnosed with ALS or Lou Gherig's disease at the age of 35. In his book, Simmons uses the metaphor of learning to fall to describe his experience of preparing for death, and he invites us to think of falling as a figure of speech. "We fall on our faces," he writes, "we fall for a joke, we fall for someone, we fall in love. In each of these falls," he asks, "what do we fall away from? We fall from ego," he says, "we fall from our carefully constructed identities, our reputations, our precious selves. We fall from ambition, we fall from grasping, we fall, at least temporarily, from reason," he claims. "And what do we fall into?," he asks, "We fall into passion, into terror, into unreasoning joy. We fall into humility, into compassion, into emptiness, into oneness with forces larger than ourselves, into oneness with others whom we realize are likewise falling. We fall, at last," he says, "into the presence of the sacred, into godliness, into mystery, into our better, diviner natures...When we learn to fall we learn to accept the vulnerability that is our human endowment, the cost of walking upright on the earth."[2]

When we learn to fall, I believe, when we learn to welcome our failures and mistakes, the dark evenings of the brain, into our lives, we may find there amidst our grief and sorrow and confusion something more - the essence of who we truly are and what we truly believe. Failure can be our wake up call as we re-calibrate our thinking and our lives - the momentarily painful tree that hits us directly in the forehead as Emily Dickinson says as sight adjusts to midnight and Life sets itself straight - offering us the opportunity to wake up and see the world and ourselves clearly, full of new knowledge and understanding as we set about the hard work of re-casting our lives.

Each time we fail, each time we face an unwelcome change, each time our hopes and dreams do not go as planned, inevitably there is loss - a loss of certain expectations, a loss of a particular understanding of ourselves, and sometimes the very real loss of a person or place or thing that means a lot to us.

But when we choose to relate to life directly, living awake and aware, we choose to lean into these difficult feelings even though we may want to shrink or fall away from the calls of lamentation, from the fearful joy that awaits us in this beautiful, impermanent, imperfect world when we risk and fail. We may want, as Mary Oliver did, to retreat to a safe haven a little way away from everywhere, and sometimes this retreat will allow us to return awake to life renewed. Sometimes it is the wind of calm, and sometimes it is the blade of crisis that draws us forward. In all of our resistance and fear when things move in unexpected ways, I believe that there are sure guideposts, that there are sure wells of strength that can nourish and ground us in times of change. Flexibility with our expectations can offer us adaptability and a feeling of rooted-ness amid all that may come our way.

When we know ourselves, when we know what is important to us, when we know what we value and what we believe in, times of seeming failure, moments when everything seems to be falling apart can be a challenge and a blessing. When we know who we are, we trust that our center will hold, that we will react and respond in ways consistent with our core values. When we know who we are, the prospect of failure becomes less frightening. Each turn of events offers us an opportunity to find out something new about ourselves, to test the congruity between our values and our actions, to shore ourselves up with history and experience. Over time, we can come to trust ourselves even in failure and mistakes, knowing that no matter what comes our way, we will be alright.

Our religious ancestors urged us strongly to lean in to the path of risk, to the path of both failure and success. Henry Nelson Wieman, the process theologian said it this way, "The ultimate commitment of faith in the religion of creativity," he wrote, "is to work to escape spiritual death,"- and he defined spiritual death as "the failure to live with the vivid qualities of original experience, with the full exercise of personal resources and with the realization of one's constructive potentialities and with a deep sense of the worthfulness of life."[3] When we allow ourselves to be lulled to sleep by routine and ritual, he believed, by blindly following the directions placed in front of us by our families or by our cultures, we experience that kind of spiritual death - failing to live with the vivid qualities of original experience, failing to fully exercise our personal resources and realize our potentialities, and failing to live with a deep sense of the worthfulness of life.

This kind of spiritual death is so prevalent in our society today, and it is exactly the kind of spiritual slumber that the Transcendentalists fought against in this country over a hundred and fifty years ago. The Transcendentalists urged us to live awake. "Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep,"[4] Henry David Thoreau wrote, and the purpose of life, he and the Transcendentalists proclaimed unanimously, is to grow a soul. If we agree with them, and I do, that the purpose of life is indeed to grow a soul, then we are charged to search out fertile ground for this growth and development. And even though I'd like to tell you otherwise, I have found no better, no more fertile ground for the development of my character, for the growth of my soul, than failure.

And so this perfectionist is learning to welcome risk, to welcome challenge, and yes even to welcome mistakes and failure. And in this process, I am consciously choosing to redefine failure as well. So many of us live lives of routine, of ritual, of safety in an attempt to avoid failures that other people will see, failures that we might need others to bail us out from - when really the ultimate failure, I believe, lies in missing the beauty and possibility of this day by lulling ourselves to sleep - What if we decided to define failure differently? What if we defined failure as sleepwalking, as remaining small in character - and what if we defined success as living awake in this world, as embracing the moments of change and difficulty and wonder, using them all as opportunities to learn more about ourselves, as opportunities to recognize and take responsibility for our thoughts and actions - What if failure were not defined, as it is for most of us and for most of society as aiming for a goal and missing, but rather as never setting a goal too difficult to miss?

In this redefining I'm reminded of the poem, "The Life of a Day" by Tom Hennen, "We examine each day before us," he writes, "with barely a glance and say, no, this isn't one I've been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real."

What if, while those all around us choose to live lives of quiet desperation, waiting for the day when their lives will start for real, what if we chose boldness instead, taking heart from Henry David Thoreau, a man who risked over and over again as he dared to live differently. "In the long run," he wrote, "men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high."[5]

May we be a people and a church community who aims at something high - who values spiritual awakeness over spiritual death - who welcomes change and risk even though we cannot know in advance where it will take us. May we lean in to the difficult and wonderful sway of possibility, vowing to stay awake and aware in this world, encouraging daring in others and in ourselves, turning our hearts and our hope to the higher purpose of love and justice.

May it be so, and Amen.

Jen Crow, Associate Minister
August 21, 2005

1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 81. (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003.)
2. Philip Simmons, Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life, 10-11. (New York: Bantam Books, 2003.)
3. Henry Nelson Wieman, Man's Ultimate Commitment, 22. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958.)
4. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 85. (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003.)
5. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 28. (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003.)