Musings From The Heart
An Essay A Day For A Year
By Roe
Day 85 March 25, 2012
The Courage To Fail
Today I am going to have the courage to fail. For many, that sounds like a definition of masochism. No one it seems wants to fail or likes to fail, and so we limit ourselves to reduce the risk of failing. I met this guy named Bo, I guess his name was short for something, and it wasn’t until I found out his last name was Ring that I realized he was Bo-Ring. The guy was in fact me, and I realized that I was boring because I was afraid to fail. When I finally met the Wizard Of Oz and was given ample courage to risk not being boring, I began to fail at just about everything. One day I used considerable courage to climb the ash cinder cone of an active volcano in Guatemala, and it took me an entire day to ascend a mere 2000 feet. Every time I took 3 steps up the ash, I slid back 2 and ¾ steps. The process was actually infuriating, but I was loathe to fail. It occurred to me that each 2 and ¾ step backwards was a repetitive failure to ascend, and that I was only moving up the cone ¼ step at a time. I took the challenge as a metaphor for life and living, and when I reached the top in tears, utterly exhausted, I like to think that I adopted a small child that I call “welcoming failure”. You might say that the success of the ascent was a triumph, but with no food, little water, and a descent of most of the night in pitch darkness without a light, and in the cold rain, reminded me of the relativity of the stubborn will not to fail, while failing in the process.
It truth, life and living is boring except for our failures. I like to call life “memory making”, and the better the memories, the better life is. Our failures are our earmarks in our life, and our failures separate our life into stages of adventures that later become our best stories and memories. We also have wonderful memories that are soft and sweet and cuddly, but if you ever listen to stories of high living around any dinner table, we are rarely proud and boisterous of our soft and sweet and cuddly times. Life tends to blend into a flow of blah-da, blah-da, hum-drum, except when our frequent failures punctuate this time and give us that indispensable reality test. Of course failure is not supposed to feel good and be special and wonderful, and we all tend to be embarrassed and regretful and resentful of our failures. Corny or not, that is the best thing that could ever happen to us. Mr. Bo-Ring goes in for name change when he spends a lot of time embarrassed and regretful and resentful, and I am a living testimony to demonstrate how making a mess of things and a fool of yourself is not boring at all.
No one really sets out to fail, or wants to fail, or likes to fail. Ironically we fail at far more than we succeed at, and so we are so careful to not embarrass ourselves or let ourselves or others down, or have regrets, and so we become Mrs. Mun Dane. Others actually choose not to be gamblers or drunks or perverts as a fetish, but instead professionally take on a myriad of projects and interests that never succeed or are finished as their fetish. We can actually have a masturbatory fetish of feeling good about the impetus, yet bashing ourselves for our worthless-ness in our failure to complete. Failure is the test of our metal throughout our lives, and we can love the neurotic feeling of never being more than soft metal.
Mommy and Daddy are our prototype successes and our initial, proverbial failures. Mommy and Daddy are neurotic, and despite being our heroes, they have some really big blind spots. Mommy and Daddy did not have an ideal marriage or sex life or adventuresome life, and if they did they did not have exciting careers and healthy friends, and if they did, they did not love us or have time for us, and if they did, they were not very good achievers. A parent that is an all around gymnast of healthy successes and failures, with appropriate quality love and time for us is in fact Mr. Bo-Ring and Mrs. Mun-Dane. If those are our parents, then we should be happy with our blaze’ average, and also recognize how our lives as an average are overall pretty so-so- I-guess-not-so-bad. But lives of taming lions while wives divorce us, and having the best dad in the world when he wasn’t in prison, are the extremes that make our lives robust in story at the dinner table.
We really all need to decide if we want to have our cake. Cake is good. Or we should decide to eat our cake. Eating our cake is good. Both are exciting and full of the extremes of success and failure. If we do decide to try and eat our cake, and also have it too, we must be prepared for a watered down life of the average of ½ the eating and ½ the cake. You can’t run away and join the circus and not expect and welcome failure, and you cannot watch Ringling Bros. on the Tv and play the woe-is-me-I-wish-I-would-have-joined-the-circus game. I have a long history of being odd and having sordid fiascos, and I like to think that these are the colors that I earn in my life. I hope that I am not always indulging in my masochistic fetish of the “too much” or the “too often”, or the “oops”, or the “oh shit”, but if I am, then maybe I am not having failures but I actually am a failure. What we hope and plan to do divided by what we are proud to have accomplished, times what we fuck up, define who we are and how we live. We earn colors in our arm chair loving our children, while watching others earning colors taming the lions that we are watching on Tv, who are estranged from their children. One may be boring or mundane, but no life is without value or contribution.
The healthiest thing we can do is metaphorically hit that yellow brick road in one way or another and keep on making those memories, and keep on earning those colors. If we envy the lives of others it is time to walk in their shoes and earn their lives, and we will soon suffer unprecedented failures, just like them. And then we take the next step towards Oz, and we will fail again, and then we face many nice and wicked witches (say hi to them for me since we are well acquainted), and we fail again. In time failure becomes just 2 ¾ steps back down the confounded mountain of life, and we are undaunted in our ascent up the ¼ that is priceless to us. We are in fact failures and we should be proud of it, and each new day we sneak out the back door with just one more grain of sand to melt into the crystal vase that becomes our life well lived.
Onward wooden soldiers we go into the fire. It is the only way to make a beautiful sculpture. Enjoy everyone, even when you don’t, for you are not boring or mundane. You are you.
See you tomorrow.
yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com
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