Preface: I’m participating in a wonderful little site called “Uncommon”; at present, it’s very small, beta-esque, invite only, and frankly, it’s taken me months to get access myself. This, the entrance question, was asked of me. My response is below (as shall all future items be archived).
Life is, I think, a string of failures; that sounds horribly negative, but it’s a matter of perspective.
According to the esoteric theories of quantum physics, there are infinite universes in which all actions, all inactions, are occurring or not occurring; where every second spins off another vector of being in which you did, didn’t, or weren’t there to “think” or “do” or “choose”.
Strictly speaking, every possible choice is a failure, “Failed by choosing” and “Failed to choose” are both failures. The entire context of “failure” has, over time, been lifted from humble logic to portentous meaning.
Most times, however, it simply means “that which is not”.
I am grateful for much that which is not. I am particularly grateful for the manner in which all that which is not has affected, directed, shaped, and shifted my perspective and being to make me this person, sitting here, right now, typing on this keyboard.
There is a keen awareness that even one, most seemingly meaningless moment in the past could have, would have profoundly changed this me, as I know me, the world, and life in this moment.
I am grateful to the bumps, bruises, and brutalities in my history in the same way I am grateful to the others who cared (or didn’t). I am filled with saudade for all the failures I did not know or will never know; the limited perspective of a human, no matter how tirelessly stretched, cannot know what it does not know. I am grateful for this failure as well, because knowing of something that one deems “better” and knowing it cannot be is far more painful that the sweet sting of saudade.
It wasn’t always this way, of course; the slow realization of the fullness and favor of this life’s many failures took time to unfold.
The understanding that even my successes are failures, literally, since I cannot be/do everything at once, was a particularly beautiful trove of discovery. The liberation of transmuting failure and transcending the culturally popular thorns as illusory…. powerful.
I am a failure every day.
I am a walking history of failures, some more “meaningful” to me than
others.
I failed to die last night.
I am grateful.