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Maybe they'd have to hold each other when it rose, all organe and full and close. Maybe that's where our romantic notions about the moon first came from. Two people holding each other to keep their hearts from breaking, because everybody they knew was dying in the cold rocks and dust piles a quarter million miles away...
The Brothers K
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torsdag, april 14, 2005
This is an excerpt from my MFP blog, which it's really unfortunate y'all don't get to read. I'll double-post sometimes, when the topics are non-confidential and particularly interesting or relevant.
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Doing the assignment for today I realized that while I have failed at an extraordinary number of things in my life, they have nearly all been on a personal level. I have had very few material failures - i.e. bad grades, not getting accepted to college, being fired, etc. So then what does this say - first about the kind of person I am (I guess I have my intellectual stuff together but not my personal stuff?) and second about what it means to fail in general. Are the most important failures those ones which are personal? Are those the most common? Are those the ones with the biggest consequences?
I brought this up with a close friend of mine and we were discussing it a little bit. She says that the assignment "makes us dig deeper and realize what failing really means--that there's something valuable beyond grades that we need to strive to achieve in." She's absolutely right - I guess the true assignment really isn't about failure at something specific, as much as it is about success in general. In particular, success is an incredibly personal experience. It's not necessarily one that society can evaluate from an impartial external viewpoint. My successes are in my personal development and growth, they originate within me. That means that my failures are in those areas as well. How are success and failure linked? With every failure comes the opportunity to succeed, I imagine. With every success is there an opportunity to fail? To become placated, satiated? To not learn enough or as much as we could?
In the end, there's really only one goal that we - humanity - striving towards, universally and individually: to constantly improve ourselves, to become more perfect.
And what is perfection? And is it attainable? And can that really be the purpose of this life?
Things that people would typically consider failures - i.e. taking drugs, hooking up, etc. - I actually consider among my biggest successes. They were such momentously important personal incidents that any semblance of failure has been removed from them. They are successes purely because that had such influence on my life, purely because I learned so much about myself and my values in the process. I literally cannot conceptualize them as failures. So how then is a failure different from success? Is there an element of "knowing better" in failing? I can't treat not knowing as a failure; it is simply ignorance. Failures must derive from situations where you "knew better" than to do X. That means that by extension, there's only one kind of failure: failure to know yourself, the truth. Is there only one success - knowing yourself fully, knowing the truth fully? Are all "successes" variations on this theme?
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