The other day I watched online the Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling give this year’s commencement address at Harvard. The title was “The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination.”

Here is an excerpt that resonated with me:

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

I too have had my share of failure. I’ve had failures in health, finances, marriage, and a slew of other things. But is that bad? The more important question is, have I learned anything from the experience of failure? Has wisdom replaced ignorance?

When we lose something – a relationship, money, possessions – we always gain something in the process and most often what we gain is knowledge. It might be an expanded lookout on life. It might be a sense of independence. It might be an increase in self-reliance. Whenever we are going through a crisis, new depths of being are discovered.

We might feel like a victim being cut open by a knife, but in hindsight we discover we were under the care of a master surgeon. With Divine Presence, we have planned the course of our lifetimes before we were ever born. Failure is to success what winter is to summer – part of a necessary cycle that leads to new growth. Whatever difficulties we pass through, we pass through for the purpose consciousness.

I wrote about this in a previous post you might want to read. The bottom line is this: we don’t come into life, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, just for the pursuit of happiness. We come into life for the pursuit of consciousness. And sometimes that consciousness is most easily gained through suffering and failure. Just ask any member of a 12-step program about the significance of hitting bottom. That’s when progress begins.

I am not trying to diminish the importance of success and moving beyond limitations. But I am suggesting that failure can be a process of getting to know yourself much more deeply, and that can facilitate the unveiling of wisdom from the source of being. That’s when we know what our purpose in life is. That is where we get true direction. And that is when we get to experience inspiration and intuition.

There is no need to identify one’s self as a failure. There is always a choice. You can say “I am a failure” or you can say “What an insight I just gained!” Identifying with failure keeps us stuck. Gaining insight and putting that insight into practice allows us to make progress.

We are much, much more than our failures or our successes. We are consciousness – infinite, eternal, formless consciousness – in the process of discovering the knowledge of that fact consciously. That is the entire significance of the universe.

Nobody is condemned to stay a failure forever. It is no more than a chapter in a very long novel. And that chapter, when we feel our limitations so keenly, it makes the eventual chapters where we are free of limitations, so much sweeter.

I’ll leave you with this gem from Meher Baba, which expands on this theme perfectly:

“When the goal of life is attained, one achieves the reparation of all wrongs, the healing of all wounds, the righting of all failures, the sweetening of all sufferings, the relaxation of all strivings, the harmonizing of all strife, the unraveling of all enigmas, and the real and full meaning of all life – past, present and future.”