Backfire or Boomerang?

If we’ve been around at least a decade or so on this good earth, we know what it’s like to have our plans unravel and our projects fall apart. We think we’ve got something figured out, but we learn, often the “hard way,” that we don’t. Maybe our attempt to build or repair a piece of furniture didn’t go together properly. Perhaps a school science project failed both in its execution and in the teacher’s evaluation. Perhaps we said something to someone with nothing but the best of intentions but that person misconstrued our words so our attempt to be helpful ended up being disastrous. It blew up in ways we didn’t expect. Our hoped-for outcome backfired.

Often when our effort backfires, we step away from whatever it was and swear to ourselves that we’ll never undertake that again. Forget “practice makes perfect”! No way we’ll “try, try, try again”! We feel burned by the backfire and, if it’s at all possible, we don’t want to risk the pain again. Yet we understand there’s not a single human being who gets everything right all the time and especially the first time. Our mistakes and missteps offer us lessons from which we may learn if we are willing. And that’s the beauty of a boomerang.

We launch something out into the world and maybe it lands as we hoped it would and maybe it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, yet it doesn’t completely fail or fall apart, it might come back to us in the form of an education. If our heads and hearts are open, it can be a boomerang experience. Maybe we courageously write a letter to the editor of our local newspaper about an issue we are concerned about, and we receive blistering criticism in response. We could think “ouch!” or we might wonder “oh?” As the experience circles back around to us, it has the potential to help us see something to which we had been previously blinded. The boomerang effectively enlightens us.

Many of us search for answers to our deepest questions about life in all its complexity and death in all its mystery. We often probe a wide variety of sources hoping for resolution, assurance, certainty. Maybe we will receive what we hoped for. Perhaps we will discover that one so-called answer only spirals into another series of questions. Maybe our quest will backfire and cause the underpinnings of our confidence to give way. And possibly, just maybe, our explorations will boomerang back into the wellspring within us, bringing fresh insights as they land.