...And other meditations on failure
I have not finished painting my house. Not even close. I have not even finished painting the entirety of one wall. It’s not just because I’ve been gone or injured almost every weekend this summer, or because I grossly overestimated my mental and physical bandwidth, or because I am only one person who cannot do all the things, although that’s all part of it. It’s because painting a house is not just painting a house – it’s setting up scaffolding and ladders and buying supplies, and scrubbing and washing and scraping and sanding and covering up windows and preparing yourself and cleaning up after yourself and trying to stay hydrated and fed. It’s a lot of things! I’m not going to get too down on myself. I’m going to try and finish the walls that need it the most before winter comes, and put primer on the rest, and live with a blue and yellow house for the next 8 months or so, plotting my comeback. This is how I can tell myself that I haven’t failed.
Last week I climbed King’s Peak with my family – my nephew, his friends, my brother, my father. We took the Lightning Trail, which is “only” two miles, but it’s a steep two miles – 1900 feet of switchbacks to the top. I have looked upon King’s Peak from our place in Honeydew my whole life but never climbed it. I realized that technically I have never climbed what you would call a mountain ever. Ridges aplenty, yes. I was delighted to find that I am capable of a mountain climber’s high. It seemed as though the peak would never come, but once it was in sight I became filled with a mountain goatish elation, and at the top I couldn’t stop smiling. I was so proud to share the experience with my family, especially my 81 year old father, who had heart surgery just last year.
And then there was the downhill, which we had to traverse mostly in the dark. There was lots of time to reminisce with my brother and father. (The kids were yards ahead of us, literally running. Oh to be 19 again!) The downhill was when we all started feeling it a little bit. My dad’s ankle, my brother’s foot, my knee. My old motorcycle injury.
What old motorcycle injury, you ask? Well. When I was about 35 I had the first in a series of cascading midlife crises and decided to get my motorcycle license. I was working as a staff reporter at our local alt-weekly at the time (read: no money to buy a bike) so I really don’t know what I was thinking. But I had this idea that I should fulfill an adolescent ambition to be what a 90’s kid thought a badass was. I’m going to link a clip to the opening credits of a show that used to air on the USA network called Renegade, starring Lorenzo Lamas, right here for context. Anyway. It was a three day course held in the parking lot across from the Redwood Acres Fairgrounds. Our tutors were a bright blonde woman in her 50s and a crusty bearded man in his late 60s who shouted encouragement as we weaved around the orange cones.
Here the thing. I’m not kinesthetically gifted. I actually think I have a bit of a learning disability when it comes to hand-eye coordination. I might have remembered, before spending time and money on a motorcycle class, my experiences trying to drive a scooter around Thailand and India. Thailand wasn’t too bad except for the time I couldn’t figure out how to stop without dragging my feet on the ground and almost ended up in a ditch. In India I only took the bike out for a half hour before realizing that the combination of gastroenteritis and chaotic roads meant I might literally scare the shit out of myself and lose my deposit, so I gave up very early.
I know how to ride a bicycle. My muscle memory for my trusty old velo is immaculate. Do you know where the brakes are on a bicycle? The handlebars. Do you know where the brakes are on a motorcycle? NOT the handlebars. Do you know what IS on the handlebars of a motorcycle? The accelerator. So. Well. The scooters I rode in Asia were small enough I could drag my feet to stop myself while my brain caught up with my body, but a big bike is less forgiving. To make a long story short, I crashed into a pile of orange cones, ending up under the bike. I did something to my knee that required icing it for an hour or more (X-rays have been inconclusive), and I failed the course. The kind blonde instructor pulled me aside in private to tell me I had failed, and that I could come back and try again. I told her I definitely would, knowing all the time in my heart that I was lying.
And that’s failure. Failure is not do or don’t do, it’s a feeling of deep knowledge that you will not return to try again. It’s a moral injury. In the case of my attempt at badassery, it was a literal injury. As a rather all-or-nothing type person, I’m often upset when I don’t meet my own expectations. And I know that if I didn’t set my expectations so ridiculously high, I wouldn’t miss them so often. But I’m getting better. On the way down the mountain last week I was wondering if I should stop thinking of myself as a failed novelist and start thinking of myself as a successful storyteller. The idea made me feel light inside. The next day, when I did not write a column for the week as I have been doing every week for the past three months (!) I made peace with the idea that maybe it just wasn’t going to happen. And here I am, back on the proverbial horse, doing the thing I promised myself I would do, just as I knew I would. I’m trying to memorize this feeling the way I have memorized the feeling of failure, the secure knowledge that I will begin again. Not quitting, just resting, always returning. I want it to accompany me as I weather the winter in my blue-and-yellow house, a different kind of muscle memory, neither gas nor brakes but true momentum.
Hell yeah.