Try Without Succeeding

 Hushed phone calls when I was a kid were always bad news. Good news is greeted with exuberance and happy laughter, so muted calls meant something was wrong. The phone in my childhood house was on a table next to the front door.  And it was decidedly unmovable, being plugged in and stuck to the wall.  This meant privacy was in tone of voice rather than distance from people.  Communication really has changed over the last half century - As a teenager I didn't imagine that one day I would be able to leave the room or find a quiet spot to have a private conversation on a cell phone.

The particular conversation I am thinking about was not unexpected, and pretty trivial really. I had failed a Spanish dancing exam, and my teacher was telling my mother who had to tell me.  It was a big deal to my teenage self though - not the actual event (I knew I had done terribly on the day), but the heavy feeling of having let all and sundry down, and not being good enough.  

It - Failure- is a concept that I have been mulling over at the very back of my thoughts this last little while.    Failure means, to quote a dictionary, "the fact of someone or something not succeeding."  Which is only useful if success is defined.  Success is the "accomplishment of an aim or purpose. "  (I used the Cambridge University dictionary for both definitions.)

It is all pretty obvious, uncomplicated stuff.

Except.

Failure comes loaded with social judgements, doesn't it?  Mostly negative connotations, which really are just a social construct.  What I mean by that, is that for failure to hurt, it needs an audience or a comparison. As you know, I love working with glass.  If I am trying out a new glass design and for some reason it doesn't work - if it cracks, or breaks or looks hideous, I just look at what went wrong, try again, and chuck attempt number 1 (or 2 or 89...) away.  But if I am demonstrating my glass skills to a group, and mess up spectacularly (Incorrect cutting, sometimes even resulting in blood letting!, or wrong firing time in the kiln for example...) that might be deemed a failure.  I have failed to achieve the goal of showing others  my ability and love of the medium of glass, and may even have put them off trying for themselves.

That's just an example, but you know what I mean.

Wouldn't t be better if failure was stripped of its negativity.  It is the first step to finding something out, to becoming better at what we try. 

(There are big exceptions of course - nobody wants to fail on their first attempt at solo sky diving for example. Nobody wants Eskom to fail.)

Who are we trying to please anyway?    Most failures are not catastrophic, and if we stop comparing ourselves and are open to learning from our experience, failure can be a good thing.  It doesn't have to be a hushed tone conversation.  I guess in the case of the dancing exam, I was trying to please my teacher (and it was probably a black mark for her studio), my gran who paid for the lessons, and my parents. (A feature of childhood is trying to impress and please your parents/caregivers, or rebel in the attempt if that fails....)  I didn't ever do another dancing exam, and that was a huge relief. So, rather than the big red F scrawled on the mark sheet, I would like to say, I Tried Without Succeeding.

There were plenty of hushed toned conversations in the house I grew up in - and I am sure in yours too if you grew up in a  pre-cellphone era. These days we just politely excuse ourselves from the room, or put down a call we don't want to take at a particular time, and we have a lot more privacy available to us.  Or not.  Social media allows the world into our lives, but not too many of us put up posts about the times we Try Without Succeeding.  Perhaps we should.  It might encourage others to do the same, and balance the scales of how success is achieved.

 

 

Me in the1980s.  I loved dancing. 

All dressed up in our back garden.