Oh I love that poem! It touches something very deep inside of me!

Vaso, I can so relate to what you were saying about failure. I experience similar. I have the feeling that I have never really failed in life and am therefore scared when it will finally happen. I feel it would be good to experience because in the end what can happen? I would still be there. And also as you described I have that issue with a 100 % committment (on an intelectual level) because I don't want to experience that I might fail I always told myself that I cant do things (like in university). I always told myself that I am not smart enough to fully grasp a topic or to get a straight A. And therefore I wasnt disappointed when it didnt happen, because I told myself that I couldnt do it. But what I experienced during the last term of my studies (that was after the level 2 and 3 course when I was full of confidence in myself) was, that without much effort I achieved everything I needed to achive and the results came from my soul and not from my brain! That was such an amazing experience because the feeling of rightness in whatever result I would get was there. I knew from my heart that I did the best I could and in doing so the need for an outcome fell away because I achieved it already: doing the best I could :-)

So what I try to embrace is the fact that doing the best I can and doing it from the heart is much more fullfilling than the need for a certain outcome. Because in the end what does it matter what grade you have or whether you can play a song perfectly? The experience and the knowledge about yourself you can gain during the journey, seems much more important to me now :-)

So that is what I try to remember when my perfections buttons are getting pushed;-)
what happens quite a lot recently because I am living at a place where I do some decoration work and when I work I try to be a 100 % focused and in the moment of what I am doing. And I like doing things properly. So very often when I am in the middle of a job the guy I am living with comes and tells me that I dont have to worry to much about doing it perfectly, or he takes the brush and paints over the parts I just spent 10 min. on to make them look very even because he didn't want me to do a second coat, but the underlying paint was still shining through. So my first reaction is that I get very tight and angry because I feel kind of undermined and I just want to stop in proceeding the work because it feels as if with that interfering the piece of soul I put into the work has been riped out.
But then I think, ok it's not my problem if I then need longer to finish a job because I will just paint over it again and realign my piece of soul.

much love