Most people see flailing as a failure. They see it as out of control, panicking, being lost and needing help. It’s inefficient, it’s frustrating, it prevents forward momentum, it creates unnecessary drama, and it’s miserable for pretty much everyone around. We all experience it at one point or another. If nothing else we go through it over and over again as children because we are learning and growing so much that it’s hard to keep up with it all let alone deal with all the situations out of our control and the things we do not yet understand yet have to participate in.
Life’s a mucky mess and sometimes you just have to flail. It’s the best response there is in the moment so go for it. For most people a little dab’l do ya, though, and whew! once the flailing is done it’s nice to not be flailing any more and to move on to better things. So we see consistent flailing as a failure. It’s something broken that must be fixed, it’s an indicator of wallowing without learning, it’s a refusal of responsibility, it’s an inability to grow, it’s childish and needs to be resolved. But what if it’s not?
Flailing can be part of the grieving process and just as necessary as all the tears. The process isn’t always a lovely sunrise gentle unfolding of new possibilities. Sometimes it’s raw and passionate and flailing is the way we discover new boundaries, recover ourselves, shake off societal needs and roles and expectations and transform. Flailing is also an option when we’re selecting our embodied lives.
If we are struggling to learn a principal, to develop skills, to become something that is so difficult we’ve failed to learn it over and over again, we may choose a lifetime that allows us to focus on nothing else. If someone struggles to live in balance with emotions or to have empathy for others and has failed to learn this through the gentle process, then living a life where these things are treated gently, like kittens licking on tattoos, isn’t going to help. Picking a life where we are battered by these issues and not allowed help, not allowed to rely on others to get us through, not allowed flotation devices but are instead thrown in the middle of the pool may seem cruel, but is instead embracing our best becoming. We learn most quickly through adversity and sometimes we just need to figure it out on our own, not because help isn’t a blessing, but because it can be a crutch and we’ve limped along long enough.
Just because someone flails, alot, all the time, OMG does anything every come easy for this person? Doesn’t mean they aren’t working hard, they aren’t learning lessons, they aren’t becoming. It could be that they just chose the hard road this time around so they can succeed.
