The "Peter Principle" and Meditative Life

  Today rains, washing the leaves of autumn into nearby gutters.  Strange clouds were brewing around the horizon since the past weekend. I remark to a co-worker about how the rain we are getting could be the bigger aftermath of last week's hurricane in the south. Things get grey and dark very fast.
   Fall is also a season about 'falls', and it's curious to trace the meaning of it in my own personal narrative. Fall, on the one hand, symbolizes cyclic falls and renewals. On the other hand, there is "The Fall" of humankind which I recall studying in my last year in high school, particularly through the plays of Arthur Miller, After the Fall and All My Sons. Both plays explore the particular 'falls' from innocence experienced by men at the later periods of their lives. The former explores a narrator coming to realize that his presumed 'innocence' in relationships with the Communist party is a kind of front or 'sham'--a theme that is recurrent in Miller's plays, as he grapples with issues of maintaining false identities to the surrounding society. The latter play deals with a man whose sons discover that he had wilfully neglected to consider safety in designing war planes, leading to the deaths of many soldiers. Both explore how characters deal with the blow of 'discovering' that they are not who they think they are or want to be. Many great plays seem to offer the platform for this discovery and self-betrayal to unfold, including Ibsen's The Wild Duck and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.
   As much as I enjoyed the study of narrative 'falls' in high school, I don't always think it's useful to consider the fall as a devaluation or a 'lowering' of status. There are times when falls in one area can reveal learning to be done in another area of life. It isn't that one falls in stature as a person, but that one is forced to re-evaluate their meaning of success. One book called The Peter Principle (Laurence J Peter) explores the notion that any rise upward in some area of life is going to eventually reach a maximum point. At that point, a person will reach the limit of what they are capable of doing in a certain area given the skills they have in the moment, and might even find others who can perform a certain job more effectively than themselves. Then they would need to examine whether they can continue, come up with a new strategy, or simply find other ways to contribute to the world besides one narrow focus on success.
  But there is another opportunity that arises when one faces having to fail in some area that one had previously identified as a personal success. I think the opportunity might be framed as a dare to embrace failure itself. The embrace of failure might refer to the attitude that falling is not going to destroy one's being. In fact, the falling or letting go is a strangely liberating release from a very fixed notion of who one is. I think the analogy in meditative life is the ability to reveal the notion of success as an idea, and to continue to point to something that isn't bound to that goal or meaning.