Earlier this year, SpaceX launched an unmanned rocket – which promptly blew up after 4 minutes in flight.
Now, had that been me, I would have declared the launch an unmitigated failure. I mean, the rocket blew up. How much more could it have failed?
The scientists at SpaceX, however, didn’t see it that way. Instead, they cheered it as a success, referring to the incident as a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” As it turns out, SpaceX hadn’t expected the rocket to remain intact. What the company valued most was the data from the disassembly and the lessons they could learn to make the next launch better.
I’m often guilty of feeling I can’t make mistakes and mess up. As if I’m not a flawed human being who sometimes gets things wrong. Even worse, I’ll soldier on in complete denial, putting ever increasing pressure on myself to get everything right, make the correct decisions, and not be seen as weak or unreliable. The worst thing for me is to have someone think I’m unreliable.
And yet, I can’t hold it together all the time. Nobody can. It’s too much pressure. Like a flawed experimental rocket blasted into the stratosphere, I’ll ultimately disassemble – and hate every minute of it.
As a person of faith, these should be the times I reach out to the Divine, but I’m often reluctant. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s some mistaken impression that I can’t even come before God without looking scrubbed clean and in my Sunday best. Maybe I don’t want to admit, even as I tumble into a heap, that I need help from anyone, not even God. The ego on me, right? I swear.
Eventually, though, I do reach out for help. I whisper a snatched prayer from memory, sending out a pleading tendril for strength, or wisdom, or healing. Then, once I’ve prayed that little prayer, I’m usually spiritually bolstered enough to do something. I come back to myself and maybe call a family member or friend, someone who knows me well, to try and make sense of what’s going on. From there, I can take action to address what’s at the core of things.
The funny thing about those those disassembled moments, as uncomfortable as they are, is that they teach me more than if I’d held it together. I learn many lessons that way, simply by falling apart. It’s as if I need to come face-to-face with my limits before I’ll admit something needs tweaking for me to move forward in a healthier, more grounded way.
I had a conversation with a friend a few months ago about how so many systems and institutions that we have counted on for so long seem to be falling apart. Churches, governments, healthcare, the environment – they’re all fractured along fault lines we didn’t notice before, or wilfully ignored. Perhaps, as humans, we don’t notice problems until they are too big to hide. Or we put our fingers in our ears and sing at the top of our lungs, refusing to see.
We should fight against that impulse in ourselves – and society in general -- and pay more attention to those who see the cracks and try to warn us. But we can’t reverse all the random unscheduled disassembly that’s already happened. It’s too late. The cracks are there and the falling apart has taken place – but there are lessons to learn if we’d only listen.
After we listen then it’s time to whisper a prayer, console each other and get to work.
Kevin Aschenbrenner is a Victoria-based writer, poet and communications professional. He holds an M.A. in Culture and Spirituality from the Sophia Center at Holy Names University in Oakland, Calif. He blogs at www.dearpopefrancis.ca.
You can read more articles on our interfaith blog, Spiritually Speaking at https://www.timescolonist.com/blogs/spiritually-speaking
