Failing at Life

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It is the little failures that get to you, not the spectacular ones. With a spectacular fail you can take comfort in the fact of having been, at least briefly, spectacular. You may not have achieved what you set out to achieve, but at least you tried where most others would not have.

No, what gets to you is the little failures, repeated every day, day after day after day. Sometimes it is someone else’s fault, like not getting to work on time because the idiot in front of you couldn’t drive. Sometimes it is your own fault, like when I pound the steering wheel and call the idiot in front of me an idiot for not knowing how to drive. I forget the people I have cut off, the unsignalled lefts I have taken, the green lights I have held up because I was busy changing the song on my iPhone. Little failures, like not getting all of the errands finished, or going to store for ingredients and coming home having forgotten one small but essential thing that you absolutely must have; or big failures, like forgetting about the Eucharistic fast and not being able to receive Communion because you just had to have that last cookie before you walked out the door.

There is nothing great about these. They don’t even merit an “epic fail, bro!” None is life-shattering but each one chips away a little bit at your self-confidence. If I can’t even get the kids into the car and to school on time, what makes me think I could succeed at volunteering for a charity? Or writing a novel? Or getting in shape? Or learning to play the piano? Are you serious? I can barely get my carcass out of bed some mornings.

And it doesn’t seem fair, because you know, and I know, that we really are trying. Not like Bubba from highschool who still lives in his mom’s basement at 32 years old, works the same job at the car wash, and in all that time has not attempted anything more challenging than Final Fantasy XXIV: The Return of Zombie Aerith. Bubba is doing fine. Bubba has no problems. One might think that he may actually have figured this life thing out. Just don’t try anything you aren’t already good at and you will never fail.

But in our better moments we don’t want to be like Bubba. We have made enough progress to know that we at least want to do something worthwhile with our lives. We love some good, or are committed to a family or some worthy project, and we are sacrificing to achieve it. Would a little success be too much to ask for, Lord? Some support, maybe?

But I will tell you a secret, although you may not believe me.

The most valuable coin in the spiritual life is failure.

I know you think I am crazy, but it is true (both that failure is valuable and that I am crazy). God draws us up off the couch by proposing some good to us. Perhaps you fall in love with a woman. Perhaps you have a child. Perhaps you have a mystical vision of the poem that will express the inexpressible. You want to be a good and holy husband. You want to be a wise, loving (and absolutely perfect) parent. You want to be a divine poet. The painful truth is that success was never the point.

When God proposes the dream to us, we must not imagine that He is saying, “If you are a good boy and you work really hard, you can do anything you set your mind to. You just have to believe in yourself.” Really He is just saying, “Here is a faint shadow of just the tiniest corner of a fraction of my Being. Will you pursue me in that vision?” So we pursue. The vision and desire for success in pursuing that vision are necessary first steps. Even self-confidence can be a step.

But in reality, whatever we may imagine, we do not pursue in order to succeed, we pursue in

order to fail. The harder we pursue, the more quickly and surely we will fail, and to a certain extent the sooner and harder the better. That was the point all along. I said above that these failures are not life shattering, but they chip away at our self-confidence.

That is exactly the point.

God wants to destroy our self-confidence, because as long as we trust in ourselves we can never be saved. Dom Lorenzo Scupoli, in, “The Spiritual Combat,” opens Chapter II, the initial chapter on the Way of Perfection with this stern warning:

“Distrust of self is so absolutely requisite in the spiritual combat that without this virtue we cannot expect to defeat our weakest passion, much less gain a complete victory. This important truth should be deeply imbedded in our hearts; for although in ourselves we are nothing, we are too apt to overestimate our own abilities and to conclude falsely that we are of some importance. This vice springs from the corruption of our nature. But the more natural a thing is, the more difficult it is to be discovered.”

 This is an echo of the Apostle Paul

“It was sin, producing death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure. For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.... Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” Romans 7:13-15, 24-25.

These are not the words of a man who is succeeding at everything he tries. He is failing, and acutely aware of his failure. This is the same man who writes:

To keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the

revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” 2 Corinthians 12: 7-10.

Or to quote C. S. Lewis (Mere Christianity): “No man knows how bad he is until he has tried very hard to be good.” The better you try to be and the harder you try to be that way, the sooner you will have opportunity to learn how far short you fall.

That is the reason God asks us to try. Not because He wants us to "be good or else," but because He wants us to want to be good, to try to be good, and to fail so that we realize that we cannot be good. Then, and not before, we will be humbled enough to ask Him to help us, to do it for us. 

We will see that our perfection is His work, not ours, we are only called to be willing participants. 

This is not to say that our goal is to be neurotic, or to lack all ability to try. That is why destroying self-trust is the second step, and not the last. Distrust in ourselves opens the door to trust in God. Unless we take that next step and trust in Him, destroying self trust would be worse than useless.

There is more to this, much, much more, but this blog is already too long so maybe another time.

The Price of Mastery

A little over a week ago I was deadlifting, which is one of my favorite lifts. It is a very heavy lift, in which the bar is resting on the ground and the lifter simply grips it and picks it up. I like the lift, but this particular time I went a little too heavy, and I lost my form. I tried to muscle through it anyway and ended up pulling a muscle in my lower back. So for the last week and a half I have been taking it easy. The whole next week I did not work out at all, and this week I am only running and biking. Next week I will add body weight exercises, and work my way back up.

The day after the injury I was visiting with my family in South Carolina, just sitting around eating ice cream, and I went into a series of back spasms that felt like they were bending my spine in half backwards. Never having experienced physical pain like that before, they rather took me by surprise, but eventually I took a muscle relaxer and the spasms stopped, or at least reduced enough so that I could function. It did not prevent me from continuing to visit, albeit from a prone position on the living room floor.

My Mom and my Aunt, lovely women that they are, went into full on maternal mode, offering every possible remedy and comfort they could think of, from a hot shower to a left over hydrocodone. My Aunt especially is an empathizer, to the point where I truly believe she feels pain sympathetically. She was more upset about it than I was. As I hobbled to the car, bent over like an old man, I told her, “It happens, you know? It’s just part of the price for living life. Sometimes the price is higher than others.” I don’t think it comforted her much, but it made a lot of sense to me.

In the intervening weeks of slow rehab I have been thinking about that statement, and I realize that I was touching on a far-reaching principle. To put the same thing another way, there is no greatness without sacrifice.

My cousin was once show-casing his photos at a photography show and an admiring person admitted, “I wish I could take pictures like that. You know, I wanted to be a photographer once. I got a camera and tried to learn, but all of my pictures were terrible.” When describing this event afterward my cousin said, “What I wanted to say was, ‘No you didn’t want to be a photographer. If you really wanted it you would have kept doing it over and over until you got it right. I can show you my early photos if you want. They suck. I just didn’t give up, that’s all.’”

The key component of talent, it seems, is the desire to do something. However, this desire is not simply the thought, “Oh, wouldn’t that be nice,” or at least it cannot be for very long. Unless you happen to be Mozart (prodigies do exist, although they are very rare) your initial attempts at any kind of greatness are not going to be great at all. They are going to be terrible. Even Mozart’s first compositions were not great compared to his mature work. They were comparatively great, great compared to the work of all the other three-year-old composers in the world.

In the same way, on a slightly less abrupt difference curve, the little girl who wants to be a dancer is not a great dancer. She does not have strength, grace, discipline or control, except compared to other little girls her own age. All she has is the raw desire, to dance, and a certainty that she can, in fact, do it. Whether or not she ever becomes a great dancer is entirely determined by what happens next. What encouragement will her efforts receive? Too little approval and she will lose confidence and give up. Too much, or the wrong kind of approval and she will think she already is a great dancer and will not work hard enough to achieve her full potential. Will she get distracted by lesser pleasures, such as parties, flirtations, pop-culture and allow the greater interest to be crowded out? Will she find a better goal, such as becoming a mother or a nun, and give up the lesser one to pursue the greater one?

(In any study of mastery there are two major questions: How does one become a master any given pursuit? And how does that mastery fit into the greater context of life? I only address the first question in this blog. The second would be topic enough for a book, rather than a blog.)

On thing is certain: if that little girl truly wants to become a dancer, she will have to sacrifice for it. She will have to turn a critical eye to her dancing as it is, comparing it to what it could be. She will have to avoid the temptation to blame her shortcomings on others, (“I would have, but I couldn’t afford lessons, my parents didn’t encourage me, it was a silly dream, I never had any encouragement, I wasn’t pretty enough, Lilly Perfect won that competition because her Dad knows the judges, etc.) She will have to choose to see failures as learning opportunities, and most of all she must not give up. She must pay the price.

The price is in getting up early or going to bed late, saying no to that extra slice of birthday cake, practicing your chosen pursuit when others are going out to the movies. It means being misunderstood by friends who do not see what you see, and think your insistence on following this particular echo very silly, especially when you are foregoing so much fun on the way. The price is in the sore muscles, or the physical discomfort of pushing your metabolic conditioning farther than it wants to go, or carrying heavy cameras up mountains to get that one perfect shot of the sunrise. The price is paid in injuries, sickness, boredom, hours and hours of mind-numbing, repetitious practice of the same basic scales and arpeggios over and over again.

So it is with deadlifting. When you rip a 450 Lb. bar off the ground and stand up straight and strong with a primal roar, feeling the steel flexing under the weight, feeling the power and stability from the soles of your feet, through flexed calves, knees straight but not locked, thighs hard as tree trunks under the strain, butt and hips tight, compact and locked, spine perfectly aligned, shoulders upright and sucked into their sockets, with every muscle of chest and back perfectly tensed to hold the posture, arms straight, forearms clenched, and fingers locked around the bar, there is a vitality in the experience that you could never feel without the risk, without the pain. There is more life, in the moment, a tiny expansion of the heart and body’s capacity for being alive. If you pay attention with mind and soul alive, there is food for them as well.

And then the price continues. As we age and get older, injuries become more frequent. Bones and joints become less resilient, muscles less flexible, pain more and more a constant. The abilities that we struggled so long and hard to perfect become harder, shakier, and eventually they slip away. We are left with the mystery of mortality, the loss of everything that we sacrificed so much to achieve, and the question, “Was it worth it?” But this gets into the second question, which I said I was not going to get into.

The point of this blog is simply that if you want to be good at anything, you must be willing to sacrifice. If you want to be great at something, you must sacrifice greatly. These are the beginning rumblings of a much further reaching set of thoughts. Who knows, maybe someday I will write a book. It will have to be a lot more organized than this, though.