Last night I was scrolling through Instagram when I came across a rabbi sharing reflections and advice. I have always had a deep appreciation for Jewish wisdom, despite not being Jewish myself. I sometimes joke that, had I been born Jewish, I would probably have become a rabbi: an old soul telling questioning people how to behave and quoting scripture from memory. And honestly, when I think about it, my life is not all that different already.
This particular rabbi was talking about failure. More precisely, he was quarreling with the very idea of it. What we call failures, he said, are not failures at all. They are simply chapters in the story of our lives. The thought landed on me immediately, the way a sentence sometimes does when it puts words to something you already half-knew.
“Failure” is a heavy word. In Italy it carries a weight that is not only social but, quite literally, legal. “Fallimento” is the same word we use for a bankruptcy: the formal collapse of a business, a chapter of the law with its own procedures and its own stigma. Until very recently the courts still called it exactly that, and the word reaches far beyond the courtroom. Someone who has failed, in business or in love or in life, tends to be treated as a cautionary tale rather than as a person who has accumulated experience. In the United States, at least in the entrepreneurial corners of it, the instinct runs the other way. Failure is treated as part of the process, almost a credential. People wear their dead startups like medals. But still, it is failure.
You know, despite what it might look like from the outside, I have failed many times. Maybe not always by an objective measure, but certainly by a subjective one. And for a long time that idea sat in me like a knot I could not untie. Because the label matters. The word you reach for does part of your thinking for you. I stress it because words are not neutral. They carry an energy, a frequency, a vibration. They set the register in which we hear our own lives.
If I tell myself “I failed”, the mind files the experience one way, as a verdict, a closed account. It makes no difference whether I am standing in Milan or in San Francisco.
If I tell myself “It was a chapter in a long book”, we feel the concept in a totally different way. One phrasing suggests an ending. The other suggests continuation. One closes the book; the other invites you to turn the page. Some chapters are painful. Some are embarrassing, the kind you would rather skip on a reread. But a chapter is only ever a part of a bigger story.
Most people know the Japanese proverb “nana korobi ya oki” (七転び八起き): fall seven times, rise eight. However, what most people do not know is that centuries earlier, and a world away, the Book of Proverbs had put it almost identically, in Solomon’s words: “Though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again” (Pr 24:16). Different cultures, different eras, and the same arithmetic of getting up one more time than you go down. I did tell you I like quoting scripture.
Our lives are books made of chapters. Some of them read as glorious. Some of them read as a mess. But none of them, taken alone, is the story.
So when the next hard chapter comes, and it will, I want to remember not to mistake it for the final page.
Keep writing. Turn the page. The book is longer than the chapter.
