Failing is good.

Every day I remind myself.

We call ourselves perfectionists because we’re in pain. We use perfectionism as a kind of diagnosis which makes us feel better about playing it safe or feeling hurt. The kind of imperfection that can become a badge of honor – the strength we pass off as a weakness in a job interview – but it fools no one.

We aren’t perfect. Stop pretending we can be.

Failure is never the end. Neither is winning. Click To Tweet

Failure is good. Failure is how we learn. It is how we become better. It is how we grow.

Failure is never the end. Neither is winning. Just ask Tiger Woods.

Like great athletes, we succeed and fail every single day. These are not our goals in life. We can’t win life-like the board game. The one with the most money at the end doesn’t win. There is no win.

Which means there is no lose, either.

Occupy Success

Most fascinating about the Occupy Wall Street Movement wasn’t its politics or its convictions or how it was able to move the conversation about Wall Street and economic inequality so dramatically; it was its methodology.

Occupy argued that change made the wrong way is no change at all. Change must be embodied the whole way or it will never succeed. In other words, it isn’t that “the ends justify the means,” it is that the ends are not achieved without the means to match them.

For the group, implementing the change on the front end: in how they gathered: was necessary. They wanted to push for greater transparency and democracy, so they chose to embody their goal in the here and now.

So they needed to embody an entirely democratic way of gathering and all decisions were made by consensus. There were no representatives to decide for the whole, but only to gather and speak to or for the group.

They lived communally and embodied the First Amendment by both claiming personal liberty and also the liberty of the group and the gathered whole.

Opportunities to work within the system were encouraged, but not passed off as the ultimate goal. Much like the Civil Rights Movement, for instance, which was founded to push for true and lasting equality in society and under the law. It was not a movement built to pass the Voting Rights Act.

Critics of Occupy Wall Street not only misunderstand the movement’s goals but underestimate the power of embodying change as necessary for creating actual change.

All violent revolutions lead to violent oppression. Because violence begets violence.

Nonviolent resistance also leads to violent oppression. But nonviolent resistance exposes the fact that those in control love to brutalize people and resort to violent tactics regardless of the threat. Nonviolent resistance leads to lasting peace because it changes the script. It embodies a different way. And after the revolution, people support the movement because it built trust precisely because it was already different.

Embodying your goal is your proof. It isn’t found in success or failure because both are temporary.

That we don’t have an Occupy political party or a self-described occupy wing of the Democratic Party isn’t a signal of failure for the movement. It is a sign of how strong the resistance to behaving differently really is: for both democratic and nonviolent behavior.

Jesus as Movement Leader

Occupy was not a Christian movement, but it better embodied the practices and teachings of Jesus than any movement of the last decade. Jesus was leading a movement embodying political change.

• He preached nonviolent resistance in the Sermon on the Mount – turning the other cheek, offering the cloak, and walking the extra mile were examples of nonviolent resistance to authorities.
• He exposed the hypocrisy of the Jewish leadership in the Temple as a Jew to other Jews.
• He gave his disciples their apostolic work of teaching and healing long before he left the scene – embodying Jesus while Jesus was still in the flesh.
• His ultimate commandment was for his followers to love GOD and love each other as themselves.  With supplementary teaching that they should even love the unlovable.

Jesus initiated a nonviolent revolution against the powers that be – not by funding an existing political party or having them run in local elections – but through embodying a completely new way of being.

Jesus didn’t run a campaign against the elites or the establishment – nor did he seem to suggest that there is anything wrong with an establishment.

What Jesus exposed was the corruption within the particular establishment, how tied it was to empire in Rome, and how the system abused and destroyed lives. Jesus’s response to that brutality was not to see the binary choice of voting vs. not voting or voting for the lesser of two evils vs. voting for a third-party candidate.

His response was to say that real change doesn’t come at the ballot box. It comes in our hearts. Not just our individual hearts, but all of our hearts.

Corruption and injustice will always be with us as long as we continue to embody a corrupt system and engender a corrupt system in one another.

And bits of that corruption will always be there. So there is no end. We cannot declare victory, call it a success and go home. Ever.

But we don’t quit, either.

We resist. Together

We embody. Together.

We unify. Together.

We change our hearts. Then we change the world.