Tragic Downfall and Happy Discovery

 I am preparing a lesson plan for the next class in the new year (2019!) and it's about tragic heroes and "happy discoveries". I am thinking about the differences between the narrative patterns of tragic downfall and accidental discovery. While the two may seem quite different, I find that the patterns have similar themes. One has to do with the importance and value of surrender.  The person in the throes of an "accidental discovery" (a comic figure, in some cases), is usually someone who is intensely bound up in some idea that is making them tense, narrow and focused on only one area of life, at the expense of a broader view. Such a person can be described as someone who sees the "trees" but "not the forest". This person's "flaw" is that they are not allowing enough serendipity to flow into their creative work, and their narrowness eventually takes them to a dead end where they cannot move forward even an inch. This might be comparable to someone who practices a spiritual tool or method and is like a "dog eating cotton": it's so dry, and yet there is nothing else to do in those cases but be in a tense state of "waiting" for something more spontaneous to appear or arise.  The happy accident is just what is needed for that tense energy to release into something wider and more expansive, but it flows from that person's ambition (which needs to relax into something bigger).
   The tragic hero has a somewhat different plight. In the beginning, one usually finds this person not in a place of intense anticipation at all. With tragic figures like Macbeth, for example, we witness the return of a hero from her or his exploits, followed by a kind of resting on a particular reputation that the character has incurred from the past, only to be followed by a tragic mistake arising from their "hamartia" (or flawed characteristic) such as ambition, pride, stubbornness, etc. The point is that such a character loses their position not necessarily in the anxiety or tension of keeping it, but more so the opposite: some small thing is overlooked, as though this person were seeing the forest but not the trees. I see this very much like in meditation practice, when a person reaches some state of mental unification and then concludes that all is well in the world, and there is no need to go further or face further difficulties. This person is prone to tragic falls because their focus is away from the details of their undoing and toward a false sense of unity. It's as though there were simply not enough attention to the details, unlike the happy accident type in the first paragraph and example.
   These two polarities, for me, represent particular phenomenological experiences of being. They symbolize the everyday situations that come up for us, such as being too caught up in details to find creative ways of seeing new things; resting on conceptual frameworks that don't capture the small details that can cause turbulence in a life; and having to work from the ground up to restore one's sense of the world, after what they knew previously was shattered or proven not so trustworthy. Certainly, I believe that young people can benefit from learning about tragedies and their antithesis, the comedies of accidents.