Learning from Failure

A commentary on NPR this morning reminded me of the role failure plays in our lives - that we can learn more from failure than from success. We can learn from the failures of others, but our own failures can be the greatest teachers.

Incompetent fathers have influenced my life, first a “no show” dad and then a disastrously incapable step-dad. In adulthood, I learned that, because of my mother’s love, I had avoided blaming her for making poor husband choices. Researching and reflecting on family history, plus my own experiences as a husband and father, have taught me that none of us are dealt a royal flush in the game of life, some are dealt worse hands than others and many of us have difficulty playing the hand we are dealt. Though my mother did a fair job of playing her favorite card game Pinochle, I learned she had been dealt a pretty crappy hand in the game of life but she did a very good job of playing it.

In Catholic school I learned the reason we all have to play the game of life. Eve ate the apple. She failed the test and Adam went down with her. According to Judeo-Christian lore, we are paying the price for the Original Failure. Whether we believe the lore or not, we must agree some failures are inevitable in life; as Buddha taught, life is suffering. How we deal with failure, learn from it and become better people is what life is all about.

The word “fail” traces back to the Latin for disappoint. The continuum of literary references to failure runs from treating it as anathema to treating it gently, with the bulk being toward the negative end. “Failure is not an option” is not attributed in Bartletts Familiar Quotations, though a Google search for that exact phrase yields 539,000 hits. By contrast, the italicized phrase from the wonderful verse by sportswriter Grantland Rice, “When the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, He marks not that you won or lost, but how you play the game”, yields only 275,000 Google hits. [A more serious - or better funded- researcher might scrutinize both sets of Google hits to eliminate the cynical references which knock the quote, a process which I suspect would eliminate many more of the Rice hits].

So, you are probably asking, what does this have to do with the number one Sense topic, the Bush Administration? I am glad you asked. If we learn from our failures, then George W. Bush should be one of the most learned people in the world. In spite of [or in fairness, perhaps because of] a silver spoon birth and a lifetime of favoritism, George has never shown that he learned anything from his personal failures, alcoholism, three arrests, improper and incompetent business management, unfair manipulation of his military obligation, and in the opinion of some, illegal drug use and falsely claiming to be “born again”. According to George, without further explanation of the learning process involved, one day he simply decided to accept the Lord and put his “irresponsible youth” [forty years worth] behind him.

Bush clearly did learn from political failures, however, both his own when he ran for Congress and his dad’s when he ran against Clinton. Bush learned how to create a false image of himself and use it to appeal to evangelicals. He has continued to embellish that false image, adding the myth of the strong and decisive commander, which fits in with the strict father mentality George Lakoff wrote about in “Don’t Think of an Elephant”. The Bush Presidency has been a colossal failure, as the majority of Americans now recognize in ever growing numbers. Yet there is no indication Bush has learned anything from his Presidential failures, not surprising in view of his failure to learn from numerous pre-Presidential blunders. He was a man of many failures which he denied or brushed off without any personal growth before he moved into the White House, and he has followed the same pattern while holding the office.

There is much for the American people to learn from our failures involving Bush and his administration. The first failure was of the Republican party to allow the religious right and its manipulators to take over the party and get Bush nominated. Next came the failing of the citizenry in allowing the 2000 vote to be close enough to facilitate Bush being placed in the White House by a 5-4 Supreme Court vote. The citizenry also deserves blame for allowing our members of Congress to enable so much of the Bush agenda. The results of the November elections and the 2008 vote will be a test of how much the electorate has learned.

For a nurturing parent, a task which is difficult because it seems too strict, is to help a child learn when a child has failed and is still experiencing the hurt of the failure. It should be seen as a teaching moment, to help the child see what he or she did wrong and how that failure resulted in the pain and what might be done in the future to better avoid the failure. I think it works better while the child is still tearful, rather than later when the child is trying to forget what happened. In our current American political situation, the Democrats and moderate Republicans need to be nurturing parents to help the American people learn from the failed Bush presidency and sycophant Republican Congress. Over time, many have risen to the challenge and that seems to be working. A recent addition is former Republican Senator John Danforth, with his book, “Faith and Politics: How the ‘Moral Values’ Debate Divides America and How to Move Forward Together”.

Going back to Bartlett’s, a possible source for the non-optionability of failure is Edward Bulwer-Lytton who wrote, “In the lexicon of youth, which fate reserves for a bright manhood, there is no such word as - fail.” That we all play better on some days than others, is shown by the fact Lord Lytton who wrote, “The pen is mightier than the sword” in 1839, the next year started a novel with the opening sentence with which I here end this posting. “It was a dark and stormy night”.