A Ramble About Failure

Some time ago I watched a movie called “Meet the Robinsons,” and in it there is one scene which stands out in particular. The main character, a boy with a knack for invention, attempts to fix an automatic peanut butter and jelly squirter, designed to dispense just the right amount of peanut butter and jelly onto two slices of bread. He does his best at it, and then tries to operate the machine... which then fails spectacularly in front of a large family which has been kind to him. He feels frustrated and embarassed, and then they turn to him and start extolling the virtues of failure (singing about it unless I’m mistaken) with excited gusto.

We don’t prize failure. I can’t think of any culture (except the fictional Robinsons) that does. Failures are worthless, and to be pushed aside by those who can show that they succeed. Failures make no one proud, especially when it’s repetitive. Sooner or later, they’re told to just give up.

Being a failure doesn’t take much. You just have to make a mistake at the wrong time. Often the only difference between success and failure is chance, stress, or the wrong thought at the wrong time. Failure happens to everyone, but few will choose to admit it, and even fewer will choose to take responsibility for it. It is always the fault of someone or something else.

Most people would consider me a failure, for various reasons. There are some days when I don’t disagree. I make mistakes. Those mistakes have consequences to them. I could argue about whether or not those consequences are fair, but since when has life been fair? I didn’t graduate High School. When I did go to college, my chosen major was one which is nearly impossible to make money at (and is often looked at as underwater basket weaving). I’ve had more (paying) jobs over the last twelve years then I care to think about. My family and I almost always seem to be in emergency situations, and it gets tiresome very quickly. Much of this has been due to choices (good, bad, or somewhere in-between) that I’ve made. Some of it has been due to other people making choices which have affected my family and I. And some of it has just been things out of the blue requiring me to make choices I didn’t expect to have to make and ride out the storm that followed.

Failures though, are first about learning opportunities. You find out what you did wrong, and then you find a solution to the problem. This is an easy enough philosophy to implement when you are talking about experimentation and invention, but it becomes more complicated when you’re talking about choices that are made with things that affect your life, and others as well. Failures can still be learning opportunities, but they are exponentially harder to recover from.

Second, failures aren’t always what they seem to be. A failure generally means that something happened which you didn’t intend. But all too often, this doesn’t mean something bad. Just because you didn’t intend for it, and the resulting consequences, to happen doesn’t make it wrong or a bad thing for you. Often, it means an open door in a direction you didn’t know about to begin with.

When I look back over my life, I see all the failures which I’ve accumulated over the years, and all the different directions which those failures have taken me. Those failures eventually led to me getting married and having a family when it was statistically improbable for me. Those failures also led me into ministry and ordination. Some of those failures allowed my family and I a couple of years of peace and stability, others allowed me to co-pastor a parish. Still others allowed me to receive treatment and to beat a disorder which few if any others in the world have been able to beat. It was more often than not my failures which opened up these doors, not my successes.

As I sit here rambling, and contemplating my latest failure, I do regret it. There are real consequences which have followed and will follow that not only affect my family and I, but also will affect others. There’s nothing I can do now to stop that chain of events from unfolding in whatever way it will. But if my experience at being a failure tells me anything at all, it tells me that, far from only being negative, this failure will also open up things that were otherwise not possible.