I thought I was the only one who lay awake nights remembering the stupid things I'd done. I once responded to the question, "How're ya doin'?" by saying that I hadn't slept well because I had lain awake for hours replaying every dumb thing I had ever done or said since I was five years old. She replied, "You too, eh?" So it's a common experience. We've all failed at being the heroes of our fantasies, not just with our New Year's resolutions.
Out here in the wide-awake world, failure isn't a hot-ticket item either. We don't get a lot of applause for announcing what a screw-up we made of some project. Maybe we should – announce more, that is, or at least have screw-ups, more failures, worthy of being announced. Here's what I mean.
Laurence Shames, American author, wrote this about failure:
"John Milton was a failure. In writing Paradise Lost, his aim was to 'justify the ways of God to man.' Inevitably, he fell short and only wrote a monumental poem. Beethoven, whose music was conceived to transcend fate, was a failure, as was Socrates, whose ambition was to make people happy by making them reasonable and just. The inescapable conclusion seems to be that the surest, noblest way to fail is to set one's sights titanically high.
"In a world where success is proved by worldly reward rather than by accomplishment, fewer people are taking on the sublime, unwinnable challenges of the arts. Fewer are asking questions that matter – the ones that can't be answered. Fewer are putting themselves on the line, making as much of their minds and talents as they might. Does it ever occur to them that, frequently, success is what people settle for when they can't think of something noble enough to be worth failing at."
And here at home, we have the leader of the Animal Protection Party of Canada, written up by Mark Medley in Live to See the Day: Impossible Goals, Unimaginable Futures, and the Pursuit of Things That May Never Be. In an article in our walrus.ca (if you run your cursor over either item you can open the link to the book or the full article). Mark interviewed her when he found out that she still went door-to-door electioneering for a job she would never win, and he asks "Why would someone devote their life to a dream they know will be impossible, or at least very unlikely, to achieve?"
I think they found something to take on as a project that, in their opinion at least, was worth failing at.
I thought of the story about the imaginary interviewer from our time who is recording the responses of medieval stone masons as they chipped away at big chunks of rock. "What are you doing?" the interviewer would ask.
First guy answers, "I'm smoothing this block of stone. What does it look like I'm doing?"
Next guy, same question, responds with, "I dunno. Bigwigs are building something, and I'm in on the job. Pay's good."
Last guy doesn't even look up. Just blows some rock dust off the stone and says, "I'm building a cathedral. Get outta my light."
The Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris took 100 years to build (1163-1260) when the average human life span was 30 years. Lots of people failed to see their work finished.
A few years back – far too many it seems – I was invited to give the commencement address at my high school. I suggested that they as graduates had succeeded quite well up to that point. Now it was time to "find something worth failing at". I did tell them in part that the instructions for becoming a magnificent failure are not complicated. I didn't write them, but I had looked at some people who could have. This is what I'd seen that it takes:
1. Be willing to be a hero.
Terry Fox said, "Somewhere the hurting has got to stop," and set out to make a difference by running across Canada to raise money for cancer research. Somewhere on a godforsaken stretch of highway in northern Ontario his body failed. His spirit will empower the next millenium of medical research and inspire everyone who has to face cancer, but his body failed.
You will have to confront being a hero, though, without having it get in your way; you will have to have an ego without letting it have you. For the people in your family and in your community that you parented, read to, coached, assisted, danced for, played for, worked with – you are a hero already. Nice going.
Marianne Williamson said this about being a hero:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you "not" to be ?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn't serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
I will digress here to say that I love Marianne Williamson for her directness even if her God-talk intervenes in most of her writing. I just remember the advice a friend gave me once who said, "There's only one thing you need to know about God. She's black."
Finally, Your history is not your destiny. (You only get two rules. Everyone settles in to survive the three-point lecture, but we haven't got time.) "Your history is not your destiny," said Peter Danielles, an Aussie who had failed to learn how to read or write until he was in his thirties but who went on to become a very successful writer, speaker and business manager. Even if you have been a really big success up to now, there is still an opportunity for you to find something big enough to fail at on the path to your destiny.
And, given the issues that we are confronting today on our planet, we need people like you and me to start taking on projects that may look unwinnable but which have to be addressed. This isn't just what's needed on the streets of Minneapolis or the wasteland of Gaza. It could be a modelling of behaviour for your grandchildren or that letter of congratulation or critique to whomever needs it. You pick it, and pick big.
It's like that old movie (or current newsreel) where the forest fire is threatening the town. The townspeople work feverishly on the fire line. Others are clearing trees. Cutting fire breaks. Big doubt about whether they're going to make it. Sound of flames roaring. Mayor comes up to the fire chief and asks, "Are we gonna make it, Chief? Can we save the town?"
Chief wipes the grimy sweat from his forehead and says, "Well, we've done all we can; what we need now is a shift in the wind."
You take on that big project. You really are that shift in the wind.
Thank you. Sweet dreams.