How To Keep A Failure Journal
We are all quite familiar with the idea of keeping a gratitude journal, a way of making a routine practice of noticing all for which you can and should feel gratitude.
Yet, Arthur Brooks, the author and Harvard professor, says he encourages his students to keep a failure journal! He has them form a routine of writing down every time they experience failure… The time they didn’t get the interview, someone broke their heart, they lost their job, they experienced rejection, plans fell through, projects collapsed… (continue the list. We’ve all been there. Frequently!)
But, that’s not the end of it.
Every time they make journal entry, they have to set a reminder for one month’s time and then three months and six months, to come back to that page and update what they may have learned, gained or grown from that “failure” experience.
It is a powerful practice to help us feel more confident and calm with the way life’s events turn out. We become acquainted and familiar with the awareness that failure isn’t the end of the story. G-d has a plan, even if our human sensibilities can’t grasp it at the moment.
Tonight, Jews around the world are going to taste apples dipped in honey, and we pray to G-d for a sweet new year. There is a profound message in that particular sweet snack.
The apple’s sweetness represents the experiences in our lives that are so obviously sweet. We don’t need to wait it out, look for silver linings or hope for the best. What we see is what we get. All our senses are having a “Sweet” time.
The honey, on the other hand, symbolizes those experiences that first felt like failure. The honey is a byproduct of an insect that is not only inedible, it actually stings!
Yet its honey is so sweet, even sweeter than an apple.
The sting brings to mind all those experiences that felt at first bitter and even insurmountable. However, when you come back to that journal entry months later (sometimes it takes a whole lot longer) you get to recognize the growth, the change, the goodness that it had propelled you towards.
The honey reminds us that the failure journal can indeed become the gratitude journal!
When we taste that apple and honey tonight, may we all be blessed with a year of sweetness as obvious as an apple’s and may we see and sense how all our past failures are sweet as honey!
Shana Tova U’metukah!
Wishing you a Shabbat Shalom and a sweet new year.
