asked “Why is it, as a rule, I have more fear of succeeding at something than I do failing??” It gave me something to ponder. I attempted to answer, but it brought me someplace different than I expected to be…
Failure feels familiar. It's well-worn fabric. It's dark jeans fading at the places that see the most use. It's the friction formed fit of my favorite black tee. It carries a certain warmth. A certain sense of welcoming. Invites a certain kind of movement.
Failure is the texture of iterating. It's the sound of complexity comingling with our most basic need to express something inexpressible in the realm of tangibility. A problem that needs solving. A beckoning. A challenge. A calling. A divine discontentment. A magnificent wrestling.
But, success feels like something different. Something stiff and listless. Like stopping, stalling, and stagnancy. Like laurels resting on something adjacent to complacency. The lilting hum of a siren singing us toward mediocrity. Like intentions curdling into the demands of what’s expected of me. Like a still life image of something that was meant to always be moving. Like butterfly wings pinned to prevent its fluttering. Like the exquisite corpse of something that once lived and breathed with the yearning breath of restlessness and desiring. Something now decaying slowly in the sterility of a white-walled gallery. In the grandiosity of a sepulcher. An ornate opulence filled with dead things.
'Success' is something ephemeral and fleeting. Something that comes and goes uncontrollably. Something that breaks in abruptly and leaves unexpectedly. A foundation made of sand built too close to the neighboring sea.
"Any success, in any realm, involves an inner impoverishment", E.M. Cioran says. It comes with a diminishment. A loss of memory. "It makes us forget what we are, it deprives us of the torment of our limits." It takes away the things that pushed and prodded us from the beginning.
But, "Failure is a shepherd", says James Victore. It facilitates opportunity. It gives us an aim. A purpose. A trajectory. Provides us with a guiding principle.
If you ask what success really is, what it really means to me, it's ever living within the embrace and provocation of ceaseless seeking, experimenting, and failing.
May we all be so blessed as to be so lucky.
In case no one's told you today, I love you with all of my everything.
Not that much of what I do is failure or success.
<I start to tidy up the place / I try to make a mess>
You mention how it's key to embrace eternal seek,
As letting go of doing stuff is fuel to make us weak.
So long as taking action keeps us free from going stale,
It's safe to say that much success can come from when we fail.
Got me thinking. Perhaps also it's how we define success? If success is exterior recognition, then it's potentially everything you talk about here. But if success is continuing to get up in the morning, to follow your nose, to do something rather than nothing....then I guess success is ok.