Just over a year ago a made the commitment to myself that I would create one of these posts every month. The motivation for this was discipline but perhaps not in the way you might think. I really enjoy taking the time to think about these posts and even more I enjoy the freedom to muse on whatever I want to, profound or silly. In the book “A Mind at Play” about Claude Shannon, he is quoted as saying (and I paraphrase) that he never worried about the importance of what he worked on, just that it interested him. That sounds to me like a wonderful, if not always realistic way to approach the world of work. Also probably easier to pull off if you are acknowledged as one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.
For me the freedom to put something out simply because I find it interesting and uplifting matters and once a month I wanted to do that too.
And then I didn’t get one done.
Last month I agonized over the fact that I just didn’t have my act together. I had some drafts and some ideas but the reality was that I was just underwater with all the other things that I had to do. It’s not as though I would be disappointing a huge audience or violating a contract but I felt like I was letting myself down. If I can’t get this one little thing, that I objectively enjoy, done then what is the point of all the other things I am doing.
Situations like this are the perfect opportunity for the obsessive and sometimes self loathing part of my brain to jump in and go crazy.
Then I remembered that I’m also bad at meditation. Teachers of meditation, really teachers in general if they are good, always say that when you fail you shouldn’t descend into self recrimination. Instead just notice and acknowledge the failure and return to the focus or the task that you were involved in.
There is a teacher of Buddhism who I happened across named James Low. He describes this idea as life always happening and always moving. According to him, movement is how we participate in the world, emerging with it rather than acting upon it, at least that is my interpretation of what he says. If we see it this way then failure is just one of the ways that we emerge into the movement that is living.
Similarly, when we play games, failure is contained and its easier to see as a virtue. Winning or losing is not the point but what really matters is how you play the game. Of course this doesn’t feel so reasonable when we are on the downside of the equation but it turns out that it really is true. Failure can be the most powerful way that a game creates agency. We can try and fail, learning in the process and then just walk away or restart the level.
It is important to be clear here, to accept and learn from failure is different than endorsing it. Samuel Beckett was endorsing it when he said. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” This quote has the dubious distinction of being if not misquoted then misused. In the context of the original text, it is quite bleak, viewing failure as the best possible outcome and hence his exhortation to fail better. On the other hand it’s also probably on a poster somewhere involving a distressed cat or an epic bicycle fail.
So maybe failure just emerges or maybe it is a virtue. I’m feeling a bit better if not great about the whole situation. So maybe I will also contemplate entropy and the end of the known universe. A simplification of the concept of entropy would be to think of it as a measure of disorder. At the scale of the universe, the thinking is that we are moving towards a state of maximum entropy - the death of the known universe. This will not be good. Fortunately it is also a long way off, so for now at least it is more of a concept than a threat. What I find interesting about the idea, is that we are in fact moving away from order into disorder or what might be seen as the failure of the structure and systems that define our existence.
Here is where I will try to pull this back from the brink… if disorder, read failure, is inevitable than what is point of trying? Turns out trying is the whole point because that is what we can do today. Yes, failure is inevitable and in life disorder will exist but today doesn’t have to be total chaos. When we are faced with a particular failure, we have the wherewithal to do something about it. We don’t need to fix it, we need to accept it and forgive ourselves. What we need is equanimity.
Equanimity is what you have when your mind is calm It begins with forgiveness, often of others but also of ourselves and just like in meditation, when focus is lost, there is no need for recrimination, just a refocusing again and again. The beauty of equanimity is that frees us from an addiction to the polarity of right or wrong, failure or success and lets us exist in the moment as part of the flow of life.
So this month I am back and if I fail again as I certainly must I will seek equanimity. For now I’m just trying to practice a little forgiveness.
Fall down seven times, get up eight! 💪