On Failure

I have failed at many things. I will not enumerate them here for the sake of brevity and my own sense of mental well-being, which is fragile at best at the moment. In this midst of yet another failure in this life, I have come upon two insights.

First, failure is a process. There is not a particular moment where I can say, well, I’ve failed at this. Time to move on. In fact, such a break seems desireable. A clear sign would be welcome. Instead, failure is something that unfolds over time. It is filled with moments of awareness and anxieties of wondering is this the clear sign? The bottom? The moment of no return? But the answers are never simple, the signs never clear.

Failure is something that we live within. The opposite is true as well. Success is not a moment. Success, like failure, is a journey, not a destination. (I feel like I have read that somewhere on a motivational poster and rolled my eyes. If you are doing the same, I understand.) To my point, failure is a journey, not a destination. There are no posters of people sailing in the sun emblazoned with that phrase, however. No one wants to embark on the journey to failure, we want only success. So success is the thing you do, the mountain you climb, the skill you master, the truth you learn. Success is the thing we go out into the world and do.

Failure is a house. It is where we live and quite often it is just fine, but then one day, the small leak with a quarter size mark on the ceiling is suddenly two feet wide and the plaster is crumbling on to your head. Then the refrigerator starts humming loudly and soon conks out. Or the basement fills with water and the repair person says, Ma’am, there are serious structural problems in this house. What can you do? You have been living here, and it seemed fine, until the water leak, the refrigerator, the basement. Still you do not realize that you are I living in a house that is decaying. You take out a loan. You fix the problems. Then the toilet gets backed up and you cannot plunge it. The plumber says, It’s the main sewer line, Ma’am. Then the back door falls off its hinges. This is your home. The place where you live. You think, well, I could sell, but the work should be done first. If I invest all of this money and time, shouldn’t I stay? Suddenly everywhere you look is decay and your bank balance is low and you must life somewhere. This is what failure is like. Every day wondering what will beak next. What will be the final sign to sell, move, start a new? There is no sign, just the daily drudgery of continuing. Failure offers no respite. With no beginning, it has no end. It is one big surround.

As I said, I have failed at many things; I have failed many times already in this life. Recently I realized that I could only walk away from the thing I was failing when I fell in love with something new. The new thing, the love of the new idea, the new pursuit, the new vision made me sell the house, pull up my roots, pursue something new. So I look around my decaying house, my daily failing and I love it. I want to fix it. I want to stay here and live inside even though it is clear, again, I am failing. I wonder, what will I love next? What next love will replace this love? What new love will help me wrap up the process of failing and reboot to try and operate again with a bit more success?

Filed under: personal writing Tagged: failure, process, success