Right/Wrong

This is true about life: no one tells you if you're getting it right. 

Many people will tell you you're getting it wrong, you're doing it wrong, even that you are wrong. They are probably wrong.  

Funnily enough, when you are actually getting it wrong, very few people will be kind or honest or brave enough to talk with you, and not at you, about what it is that's wrong, and how it is that you can start making it right. 

Even fewer will talk with you about what is wrong while staying present to what you're already doing right, even in the midst of your most terrible-seeming wrongness. 

And the most terrible-seeming wrongness is when you're doing your absolute hardest to get it right, and yet, despite all reason, all sensible effort, you still seem to be getting it wrong. Not because anyone has had those brave and kind conversations with you and you understand what needs to change, but because that wrongness veers alarmingly out of control and becomes outright failure. Not minor or short-lived failure, but big, ongoing failure, the kind that changes the landscape of your life. 

And in the middle of your failure, there are very few people who can say anything useful at all, about rightness or wrongness or anything else, unless they too have known that place of failure. 

And if they've known that place of failure, there aren't a lot of things they will say, but this is one of them: no one tells you if you're getting it right. You have to figure that out for yourself. And the most powerful place to start figuring that out is right now, in the midst of your failure. Because that's where you get to decide: is this even about rightness/wrongness, or is it about something else? (Hint: it's always about something else). And when you start thinking about what that something else is, you've already moved from judgement to assessment, and that's the first step that you - that anyone - needs to take to get to whatever it is that's right for you.