Unafraid of Failure

  Ever since reading about Naikan therapy in the Buddhist mental health class, I have been thinking about what the essence of repentance really is. One thing I came up with is that a repentant attitude is remorseful but not afraid of past failures. In fact, in order to be repentant, it almost seems that a person would have to have no attachment to what they've already done. Instead, repentance entails simply resolving to learn from the past and gather energy to focus on the current and future goals.
   The point I am making is: without a proper perspective on the self, repentance can easily become a kind of self-attachment. I am reminded of that famous scene in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, when the character Emma Bovary's childhood is described. As a child, Emma was apparently so enthralled with the church that she 'made up' stories in order to have something to say in confession. There is a subtle attachment in cases like this: that is, attachment to the 'purification' that one hopes to achieve when they do repentance. But if a person lacks any attachment to self, then there is nobody who repents. Repentance only becomes a kind of gathering together of past lessons and an active resolve to change them. It in fact has no relation to an enduring sense of identity.
   I am also reminded of this other, slightly different potential strategy, and that is not being afraid of failure. I like this second strategy because fear of failure also arises from an attachment to self. We are so afraid of losing what we have worked so hard to gain in the past. But nothing ever stays the same, so there is no way that any amount of hard work will guarantee that something will continue to exist forever. "Failure" in this case may well be part of the journey to understanding.
   Now what would happen if a person were accepted as much for their failures as for their successes? What would happen if we had classrooms where people who 'fail' academically are actually honored in some way, either through a caring circle or through a supportive structure? These sound like silly ideas, but until one is able to be comfortable with the inevitability of some kind of setback or failure in life, then failure itself gets banished into the nether regions of the mind--where it is never admitted by anyone!