Endings Are Not Failures

In society, we love to label things a failure. People are quick to put relationships in the failure box. I’ve heard people call a decades long marriage a failure because they are now divorced. And, it always stirs something inside of me. Just because something ends, does not mean it was a failure. So much in Human Design teaches us this, whether thru the experimental nature of a 3 line which tries things out, experiments, gets knocked down and gets back up to try out something else or the lessons of Gate 32 which carries the fear of failure….

Everything has an expiration date. We ourselves, have an expiration date. That doesn’t mean that when we die, our life was a failure. And no matter, how long your partnership lasts, you did not fail, if you are no longer together. Some things are for a reason or a season, as they say. Not everything is meant to last forever. When I looked up the definition of failure, one definition was: “lack of success”, harsh and in my opinion, inaccurate or at least singularly minded. What is “success” really?. The other - “the omission of expected or required action”, which made me actually think of a lack of fulfillment around our expectations. Because that’s really what it is, we expect a relationship should last forever or we expect to always stay at the same job, or win the award, and when that expectation is not met, we deem it a failure. Which, expectations are kind of like assumptions and we know the old saying there… “they make an ass out of you and me”. We tend to focus on one moment in time, the destination, the turning point rather than all that came before it, the journey, the lessons, the growth (hopefully), the ways in which we evolved, we helped others to evolve, etc…

There are several Fear Gats in Human Design. The gates of the spleen, solar plexus and ajna all carry specific fears associated with that definition. Gate 32 in the Spleen center is the gate that carries failure as its shadow. Ironically, or not so ironically, it is referred to as the gate of duration or “change as the only thing that endures”. If you don’t have gate 32 defined it does not mean you don’t have a fear of failure. We all have access to all the things, we are conditioned beings, and we are complex, not just a sum of parts, with many ways and places that archetypes can show up for us in our Human Design and natal chart. Regardless, of definition we can look to the gate for wisdom.

Interestingly it is part of the Ring of Illusion along with Gate 28 which carries the shadow of purposelessness. Purpose is a big buzz word of late. I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve had who want to know their purpose. Richard Rudd shares that the only purpose we have is “to live well”. Which probably means something different to each of us but definitely has some overarching themes. Living well is an art form. And, purpose drives us to achieve certain things in our life. When we don’t, we feel shit. I would also say that our purpose, and you could certainly put it in the bucket of living well, is to live OUR UNIQUE journey which the schematics, or outline to our story, are laid out for us in our Design. Our Soul chose to come and have our human experience. Much of that journey is a path back to wholeness, is deconditioning from everyone else’s ideas about how to live and I would put society’s views about what is a failure in that bucket.

You get to define what success and failure look like for you and I would argue that nothing really is a failure, it’s all perspective. A path we walked down for many years may suddenly hit a dead end. We may lose a job and if we have self awareness and we take a pause and reevaluate we may find we didn’t like that job to begin with, we may find that the loss is a catalyst for a much better, more aligned job which comes our way as a result of that loss and had the Universe not given us a kick in the pants we might have continued on that path for who knows how long, our whole life(?), doing something almost by rote, not realizing our light went out. A relationship might end because we have learned everything we can from that person, because there is someone else, or time in solitude is needed, for the next level of our evolution. And, this is not to say don’t work on your relationships, work on your relationship, if at its core it still feels in alignment. Relationships take effort, I’m not advocating quitting, I’m advocating awareness. We get to decide and often things feel like a failure because we are clinging to the expectations. We are not in acceptance of what is. We are not taking the time to reflect, we are panicking and scrambling.

Some are more afraid of success than ‘failure’ and that is a whole other conversation but a seed worth planting. We can get in our own way because we are afraid of the visibility that comes with success or the responsibility or many other possibilities. We can self sabotage to keep ourselves small, to stay in the comfortable known, even if it feels uncomfortable because the uncomfortable known is still more comfortable than taking a step in the dark. We can apply this to more than the fear of failure… are we acting from a wound or other fear or empowerment? From the space of “should” or true desire? Are we oriented toward the future vision or acting from memorized default settings of the past?

We can take the incorrect action trying to avoid risking failure or we can take no action at all from the same fear. We always want to look at the energy behind our action or inaction. Why are we doing the thing we’re doing? Or why are we standing still?

Innerstanding our Human Design can be a permission slip into more ease, authenticity and prosperity. A coming back to wholeness. We are never meant to feel boxed in by it, but expanded, invited. I’ve also seen people give over their agency to their blueprint or use it as an excuse to self sabotage or stay small. Everything has a high and low vibration and this is a way of staying in the Shadow. This might be a One line who over consumes knowledge, too afraid to take a step forward and not “know enough”, a three line who tallies failures rather than experiences that offer them information bringing them closer and closer to their truth, to clarity of their next right steps, and experiential wisdom. Manifesting Generators are meant to have many interests and be allowed to bounce around and I’ve also seen folks do launches that maybe didn’t go the way they wanted and then give up and move on to something else, or Generators who can’t weather the plateau. It’s all about the energy behind it. If you are a Man Gen and you feel genuinely done with something and ready to move on, follow your inner authority. But, if you are embarrassed, or disappointed, or you are panicking and acting from that place, that is not following your Design that is using it to justify giving up because you are afraid to ‘fail’. It’s like when we don’t give it 100% because if we don’t give it our all and fail then we have some weird half-assed crutch to fall back on, like well “I didn’t really try”.

And that brings us back to the beginning, the only real “failure” we can commit, is not devoting ourselves to a life well lived and that requires risk, putting ourselves out there, trust, and defining what ‘well lived’ means for each of us. We can ask ourselves this question every day. Am I living well? Am I leading with love? Am I leaving people and situations better than I found them. How do I want to be of service? Am I having fun? Am I flirting with my life.

And we can remember that, endings are really just new beginnings in disguise because as Gate 32 teaches, the only thing that endures is change.