My Experiences of Failure

Most of them are not “epic”—they weren’t earth-shaking, life-shattering events. But one or two of them were! I’ll offer just three among the many:

• I recall so vividly even now a class during my second year of teaching (a story I shared in a blog a couple of years ago).  It was one of two sections of the same general education course I was teaching.  I was preparing, substantively and procedurally, the best I could—despite the fact that graduate school had taught me all about content and virtually nothing about process and pedagogy, except what I could absorb from my own teachers—and I was doing well to stay a week ahead of the students.

The morning section was going pretty well, by my lights, but the afternoon section totally sucked!  Almost everyone sat there like stumps on logs, body language full of passive aggression, unresponsive to every attempt to elicit conversation. The one or two exceptions in the group were soon smothered by the pall of apathy that settled over the class.

About mid-semester I confessed to the class my frustration—that I knew it wasn’t working and was willing to accept my part of the responsibility and make some changes—what suggestions could they give me to make this better?

It was like waiting for an echo in a closet—nothing came back! So I plodded through the rest of the semester, imparted information, gave the tests, reported the grades and walked away feeling like an utter failure. I wish I had understood then the notion of the sacrament of failure—I had done what I could do and needed to move on.

How I could have profited then from the kind of supportive community of colleagues, who had faced similar experiences, which I later sought out and found—that “companionship” of failure I referenced earlier!  This is an example of the kind of failure that WILL repeat itself, but each of those can be a learning experience.

• The saga of trying to quit smoking. I started smoking in college and, alas, theatre was the “culprit.” In a production of “The Glass Menagerie” I was playing the role of Tom Wingfield, the narrator of the play, whose smoking habit is integral to the character and to virtually every time he is onstage. By the time the play was over, I was hooked!  Eventually, when I decided to quit, I had been smoking for over 30 years and both the nicotine addiction and the habit’s connection to so many routines—a cup of coffee, writing at the computer, grading papers, a glass of wine—had their firm hold on me. I tried to quit and failed multiple times—from a gradual decrease in how often I smoked/how much I smoked, to going “cold turkey,” to hypnosis, to medication—and every failure was an experience in what NOT to try next time, but to try not to give up.

Over a period of months, as discouraged as I was, I decided to try a different approach. I secured some nicotine patches and chose a special day several weeks away—my 54^th birthday! I decided that, beginning that day, I would put a patch on my arm first thing in the morning and make a commitment not smoke that day—no promises except for that one day. The next day, I did the same thing, and the next day and the next day . . . . With every day a potential failure, I counted the days, the weeks, then the months—and after 3 months it got easier, and at 6 months, success, with no further craving to smoke! This was an unforgettable incident in my life that served as an example of one of those opportunities for not giving in to failure and learning from it.

• Finally, a failed marriage, surely the locus classicus of failure! The details are not needed here—and I place no blame because it always takes two—but, like most such relationships, it was a long time coming. In fact, it had failed well before I could acknowledge that it had.  Did I recognize that it was troubled? Oh, Yes. Failed? Oh, my, No! Because I had come from a religious background that didn’t allow for failure in marriage and the vows we exchanged were for “as long as we both shall live.” But trying to believe, given enough time, that it “would all work out,” simply brought misery and depression. When, finally, with the help of a wise and able counselor, I was able to acknowledge the reality, and I “walked away,” I was acutely aware  that it was a failure to keep that vow! At the same time, although I had no grasp of the concept of a sacrament of failure, that is in a sense what it was—I had done what I could and it was time to move on.

Was it an agonizing decision? Oh, Yes! Walking away from my wife and my children—even though I left them with our comfortable home and supported them financially and faithfully for years (I suppose, to keep the metaphor, I didn’t “shake off all the dust”)—was the most excruciating thing I’ve ever done. But I learned more about myself and vowed to try not to repeat my mistakes.

Eventually I met the woman who became my friend, helped me begin to shed the “dust” I still carried, as well as encouraging me to cope with the difference between loneliness and solitude—and as the friendship grew over a period of several years, we came to understand that there was more to the relationship than friendship. We have now been married for 35 years and she is still my best friend as well as the love of my life. What I learned about myself, about life, and healthy relationships from the failure of my first marriage has played a major role in the success of the marriage I now cherish.

I hope that these instances of failure and what I learned from them will generate remembrances of your own and that your reflections on those experiences will refresh your resolves to know when “the sacrament of failure” with “the dust off your feet” is appropriate and when a failure is a stimulus to “learn and try again.”

May it be so.