Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life (6 page)

But to those who have not learned the piercing power of appreciation, the taste buds of life grow dull.

To have everything is to have nothing. Overwhelmed by quantity we lose all awareness of life crystallized into small pieces of joy and insight and gratitude. It is the death of the soul.

The fine art of having something left in life to want gives people the power of purpose. Something to strive for stretches us. Something to work for teaches us things we would never have tried to learn any other way. Something to be grateful for enables us to know the power of gratuitous love, the willingness of others to sacrifice themselves for us without any thought of reward for having done it.

Instead, the poverty of plenty costs us the headiness of delight. It deprives us of the intoxication of small joys. It leaves us with little to look forward to, with nothing to reach for, with the cold hard reality of having nothing new in life to wait for in the long cold days of winter.

“Keeping up with the Joneses,” of all possible reasons for drowning the soul in a plethora of things, has got to be one of the world’s puniest guides through life. Surely the purpose of life has got to be about something greater than competing with neighbors who don’t even know they’re in a contest.

“Poverty of goods,” Montaigne wrote, “is easily cured; poverty of soul, impossible.” I’m not quite so pessimistic about poverty of soul as Montaigne is. I think that engorgement with goods, like any other unbalanced diet of bananas or chocolate or ice cream or steak, soon becomes unpalatable, sickening, inedible, noxious. Sooner or later, in desperation perhaps, people will be forced to go inside themselves to find the parts of life and soul that are not being nourished and figure out why. Then, surely, they will stop to enjoy what they have and detach themselves from the glitter to find the glory of life.

There is really only one small difference between the politician who had so many houses that he couldn’t remember
exactly how many and the homeless man who had nothing and yet gave the diamond ring back to the woman who had accidentally left it in his cup: One of them had everything and was satisfied with nothing; the other had nothing and was satisfied.

And there is a cure. The Chinese philosopher puts it very succinctly, “Manifest plainness, embrace simplicity, reduce selfishness, have few desires.” Once we do that, we will all rest better at night.

For some, the greatest fear of them all is the fear they feel for the coming day. For the meeting tomorrow. For the report tomorrow. For the speech tomorrow. For the test tomorrow. For the game tomorrow. What if I fail? And we say the unspoken always, What will I lose as a result? It’s a pity. The question ought to be, And if I fail tomorrow, what will I gain as a result?

Don’t be mistaken: Failure is not a prescription for the good life, but failure is indeed inevitable. It’s not a terminal disease. If anything, it may have a great deal more to do with a healthy mental attitude toward life than success can ever breed.

In an earlier period, adults liked to see children play sports because, they said, they wanted their children to learn to lose. Not now. Now, the hype is so high, the adult investment in children’s games so serious, the public attention so
intense that the stress of it, the fear of failure, now follows children from Little League at the age of six through all their born days.

When they could be learning the lifelong lessons of failure, they are now practicing to throw a ball higher, faster, farther, with more accuracy than some little six-year-old neighbor. Until eventually throwing the ball becomes more important than running in the field or playing with other children or learning to laugh at themselves when they fall short of the goal and flat in the mud at the same time.

The problem is that the lessons we do not really intend to teach them—practice, practice, practice, prevail, win at all costs—are too often precisely the ones they learn. And those lessons, learned in childhood, can affect us for life, years after the game playing is over and the stakes are real this time.

One thing for sure: No one escapes failure. The bad business deal happens, the promotion goes to someone less experienced, the crop dies, the Christmas tree falls over on Christmas morning, all the ornaments broken with the in-laws coming at noon for the perfect dinner. We don’t win and we break down. No doubt about it: Success can be every bit as demanding as failure.

We find ourselves in a situation where winning all the time is at least as bad as failing. “The toughest thing about success,” Irving Berlin, the great composer, wrote, “is that you have to go on being a success.”

We all have within us the scars that come from failing to lose once in a while. “The smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd,” circus performers call it as they go back
again and again into the lion’s cage, to the top of the trapeze to risk their lives for the approval, the applause, the social status that comes with winning. Who wouldn’t fear losing once they have learned that to be acceptable to others you must always win?

The irony of it all is that it is only failure that inures us to losing. We need failure to learn that we don’t need to win to justify the reason for our existence. Winning is part of life, yes, but human beings can live healthy, happy lives without it.

We are not born to win; we are born to grow, to develop, to become the best of ourselves—and to enjoy life. We’re not here to turn life into a trophy machine. Somewhere along the line, we learn that second place is not good enough. Athletes lose silver medals in milliseconds in the Olympics and consider themselves losers. As some apocryphal philosopher taught, “No one ever remembers who came in second.” Well, maybe not, but few people ever remember who came in first either.

No, life is not about winning. It is about trying, about participating, about striving, about becoming the best we can be, not the best by someone else’s measure. That’s what failure does for us. It teaches us about ourselves: our energy level, our endurance level, what we’re naturally good at and what we’re not, what we like and what we don’t, what it means to do something just for the fun of it. Failure doesn’t mean that we cannot compete; it doesn’t mean not to give everything we have to doing what we do. It does mean that just because we play we don’t have to win. The playing is the thing.

Most of all, it gives us the permission to go through life without public certification. Failure enables us to take risks as we grow until we find where we really fit, where we can not only succeed, but also enjoy the challenges of life as well.

No, winning is not everything. But we will never really know that until we lose a few and discover that the world does not end when we lose. Now it is just a matter of trying again somewhere else, perhaps. Now we’re free to be unnoticed. We’re free to do what we like best, what is needed most, what will bring us to the most we can be: the most happy, the most competent, the most satisfied with who we are and what we do. That means, of course, that we have to make choices about what we want to do and why we want to do it.

It’s not easy to establish priorities in life. Most of life is spent needing to do everything at once. And that’s impossible. At least it is impossible to do them all at the same level of artistry all the time. There are simply some things worth doing that at some times are worth doing poorly. Sometimes the soufflé doesn’t come out as raised as we would like it, but it is food on the table and that is all that matters for now.

The ability to deal with failure, with doing some things well enough without having to do them compulsively, is a great gift.

One of life’s greatest failure stories is about Manteo Mitchell, leadoff runner on the USA’s 4×400 relay team for the 2012 Olympics. The United States had won every Olympic gold medal in the 4×400 relay race since 1980.
This year’s competition from the Bahamas was good but Team USA had the edge. Manteo Mitchell set up for the first leg of the qualifying round, relieved to know that, despite the fact that his leg felt sore from a fall he suffered his first day in the Olympic Village, he was full of energy and ready to go. But then, suddenly, in the middle of the race with 200 meters to go, he felt his leg snap. “I let out a cry,” he said later, “but with all the noise no one heard me.” And then with one last great effort, he kept on running on a broken leg and enabled the team to qualify for the finals. “I knew something happened but I didn’t want to quit and let the rest of the guys down,” he said.

Team USA did not win the relay in the 2012 Olympics without him, but Manteo Mitchell showed the world that it’s not winning that really defines a person. It’s seeing your responsibilities through to the end, it’s finishing what we start that counts. But Manteo warns us, as well, that fear of failure may itself be destructive. To do what we do to our utmost is one thing; to go beyond what is truly developmental simply for the sake of winning is another. The ability to tell one from the other is of the essence of psychological adulthood.

Then, whatever happens, we have developed into full and happy human beings. Failure, we come to understand, is what, in the end, makes a real success of us all. Logan Piersall Smith, whom few recognize or remember, for obvious reasons, may understand the whole paradox best. He writes: “How can they say my life isn’t a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and
escaped being eaten?” Or to put it another way, who’s to say that just because Cornelius Vanderbilt made millions selling railroad cars doesn’t mean that the rest of us can’t be just as happy with life by being able simply to pay our bills. It all depends on our definition of success.

I heard a professor of communications tell a story once that completely changed the way I looked at the relationship between success and failure. A young boy, he related, received a dartboard for Christmas and immediately began to play with it. The first dart he threw hit the bull’s-eye! Excited, the father called the child’s mother into the room. The second dart the boy threw hit the bull’s-eye again! Wide-eyed with pride, the father gathered the entire family. The third dart the boy threw was another bull’s-eye! Then the boy stopped throwing darts and put the dartboard away. No amount of coaxing could get him to open the game again.

In this society, winning has always been everything. It’s in our national DNA. We claimed a continent by subduing the people who were already here. We made ourselves a nation by waging wars that were either so small our adversaries
don’t even remember fighting them or so large that our adversaries’ greatest mistake was to discount us. But win we did. And, in the end, it was out of that national myth that we spun a national self-image that colors our thinking to this day.

In this country to be number two at anything rather than number one—to be .001 of a second behind the leader, to take the silver medal rather than gold in anything—is to fail. “Nobody remembers who was number two,” adults tell children, and so mark generations of winners with the scars of hidden shame where the feeling of success should be.

But that perspective on life is itself a sad commentary on what it says about a person who has the will to try. As a result, failure gets short shrift here. And that’s the shame of it. The child with the dartboard knew what his father did not intuit: A record like his could only be shattered, not enhanced. From now on he could only be known for losing because he could never win so much again. It is an awareness long cultivated in a society that starts distributing trophies and blue ribbons to three-year-olds.

We fear the public humiliation of not being first. We shrink from being willing to try and so we never learn that achievement is not a public thing. Achievement is the awareness within us that we have stretched ourselves to the full length of ourselves. We have become the best we know how to be. And it is failure that teaches us that. Failure, in fact, is a necessary part of the process of real and ultimate success.

As a result, whole generations grow up never appreciating
that simply being willing to compete at anything is worth the effort. To participate in anything that does not guarantee that I will be chosen is an act of great humility. It means that we are willing to put ourselves in the public arena and trust our dignity and efforts to the responses of the crowd. It is a cry for public support and respect. To make only winning worthy of respect is to demean everyone else in the process, to debase all the others who clearly have an ability and risk the response of the crowd.

But failure is about more than competitive events; it’s about deep commitment to personal development. It asks of us a searing question: If I am not willing to fail, why not?

Failure is a teacher. Without failure we can only guess at what success could really look like if we exercised ourselves just a little bit more, practiced more often, tried more earnestly. Trial and error is not loss. It is the stepping-stone to success. Without failure all we have is untried ability. Accent on “untried.”

When we set out with all our hearts to star in any given domain of life and do not, we have not failed. At most, we have discovered that our gifts are elsewhere, that happiness for us is a matter of being able to give some other gift. Untold numbers of people have learned by being refused a degree in, say, computer programming that their true calling is working with the disabled, or becoming a teacher, or doing interior decorating or selling real estate or doing anything on the planet except computer programming. In failure, they have learned to be grateful by having tried and failed.

When what I do makes me feel more inferior than
happy, more a failure than a success, more embarrassed than confident, failure gives me the chance to reassess my course in life. We are not born to be miserable. We are born to be fully alive, to be happy, to give our gifts to the world with the joy that comes from doing our best and having it mean something to someone else.