A New Friend

My wife and I started meditating about ten years ago when the silent specter of failure still colored many of my days. I was vaguely familiar with meditation’s purported benefits, though I didn’t really care why other people did it. I sensed that it would be good for me to spend 20 minutes every morning purposefully doing nothing. Doing nothing, I quickly learned, is not so easy. While I might be sitting quietly, with my eyes closed, neither watching nor listening to anything, I was still thinking. Those thoughts just keep coming and coming and coming. There’s no stopping them, there’s only the choice not to follow every single one that shows up.

It’s a good practice for a writer who must choose which thoughts to follow on the page and which thoughts to ignore. But it’s also instructive for anyone feeling haunted by failure. The concept of failure is the peculiar threat of nothingness. Ask someone to describe failure and this is likely what you’ll hear: just nothing. The empty room, the fallow field. Death, really, only visited upon the living. Why wouldn’t you be afraid of that, the same as you’d be afraid of ghosts and zombies?

Interesting, then, that a guy haunted by failure should decide to begin every day trying to do nothing. And I say trying because most mornings I failed to do nothing. Most mornings a thought arrived and I’d follow it and follow it and then remember I was meditating and let it go only to have a new thought show up and follow it too. It’s called a practice for a reason.

By the way, when you’re practicing something, failure doesn’t mean nothingness. It just means you fell off the beam, played a wrong note, or followed a thought, and so you try again. Failure to successfully do whatever you’re practicing doing never means the end of the practice. It is by definition a part of the practice, for if I never failed to do the thing I wanted to do, there would be no need to practice. I’d have perfected it.

As someone who has spent all of his life practicing all kinds of things, I’ve had to accept there is actually no perfecting anything. As soon as I start getting good at something, I begin to see the potential for what else I could do with it – with essays, with music, with interviews, with conversation. Anything. And the path that potential leads me down will be littered with my missteps and errors, failure now a friend reminding me to keep my eyes on the road.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

William KenowerWriting, William Kenower, Success, Failure, PracticeComment