Disappointment
is inescapable but necessary; a misunderstood mercy and, when approached properly, an agency for transformation and the hidden, underground engine of trust and generosity in a human life. The attempt to create a life devoid of disappointment is the attempt to avoid the vulnerabilities that make the conversations of life real, moving, and life-like; it is the attempt to avoid our own necessary and merciful heartbreak. To be disappointed is to reassess our self and our inner world, and to be called to the larger foundational reality that lies beyond any false self we had only projected upon the outer world.
What we call disappointment may be just the first stage of our emancipation into the next greater pattern of existence. To be disappointed is to reappraise not only reality itself but our foundational relationship to the pattern of events, places and people that surround us, and which, until we were properly disappointed, we had misinterpreted and misunderstood; disappointment is the first, fruitful foundation of genuine heartbreak from which we risk ourselves in a marriage, in a work, in a friendship, or with life itself.
The measure of our courage is the measure of our willingness to embrace disappointment, to turn towards it rather than away; the understanding that every real conversation of life involves having our hearts broken somewhere along the way and that there is no sincere path we can follow where we will not be fully and immeasurably let down and brought to earth, where what initially looks like a betrayal eventually puts real ground under our feet.
The great question in disappointment is whether we allow it to bring us to ground, to a firmer sense of our self, a surer sense of our world, and what is good and possible for us in that world, or whether we experience it only as a wound that makes us retreat from further participation.
Disappointment is a friend to transformation, a call to both accuracy and generosity in the assessment of our self and others, a test of sincerity and a catalyst of resilience. Disappointment is just the initial meeting with the frontier of an evolving life, an invitation to reality, which we expected to be one particular way and turns out to be another, often something more difficult, more overwhelming and also, strangely, in the end, more rewarding.
-from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
Yes. Disappointment, when we stop treating it like a mistake, becomes an initiation. Not a punishment, but a pulling back of the veil.
The false self always thinks something went wrong. The deeper self knows this is the moment things begin to go right. Not because it feels good, but because it clears the way. It breaks the illusion we mistook for belonging. It calls us home to something truer.
Thank you, David. This reminds me that heartbreak is not the end. It is the threshold. And the ground it brings us to is real.
Disappointment as a catalyst for resilience and firmer footing of our self…such a gorgeous way to think of disappointment and so very true. Thank you!