dancingthroughchaos

‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.’ – Winston Churchill

The first exam I ever failed was Latin in the third year.  I was devastated.  I had never failed at anything in my life – apart from Primary School sports days; but that was recreation, right? Not real life.  I was 14 years old. 

I remember getting the result and simply staring at it.  Surely there had been a mistake.  Was this someone else’s paper?  I don’t know if ‘time stood still’, or any of those other cliches, but I do know that I found myself in stormy waters, unchartered territory, and, in that moment, equilibrium slipped away from me. 

Latin.  No one even teaches it anymore do they?  I sure as heck never understood most of it – as evidenced.  Did it matter?  No; not really.  But it felt like it did.

That day was less a blow to my academic career and more a dent in my personal pride. I hadn’t known I had any; talk about naive! I don’t recall much wringing of parental hands, concerned whispers behind hands or obtuse references to my diminished career prospects in consequence of this alarming, and unexpected, fall from scholastic grace.  My Latin teacher, herself a living fossil (God bless her), was less than astounded, raising barely an eyebrow at this long foreseen bombshell. At the ensuing parents evening she simply pronounced loftily to my parents, “Jennifer has reached her potential in this subject.”  No kidding.  I was always more ‘Ecky thump’ than ‘Ecce Romani’. *

Meanwhile, I licked my educational wounds, comforting myself with the knowledge that at least I had gained the highest mark of those who had also failed.  It proved to be only cold comfort.

In a family where academic achievement was applauded loud and long, it took me longer than most to understand that messing up one exam is not the end of life as we know it.  Others laughed off their slip-ups, whereas I retreated into morbid self-reflection and flagellation, trying to identify where and how I had gone so terribly wrong. The mental dawning that life is about so much more than exams came rather later than I would have preferred, and considerably further on than was truly healthy.

Many waters have passed under the proverbial bridge since that day.  My rudimentary Latin has served merely to help decipher the occasional  cathedral memorial tablet, or facilitate completion of a not-too-complex crossword puzzle. Not such a great loss after all.  It was still useful some years later, to remember that the sun would probably rise the next day as it had then, when I was rejected from all the Universities to which I had applied.  Every. Single. One. My Dad’s much proffered Biblical quotation, ‘and it came to pass’, was not  overtly inspiring; but it was moderately reassuring.

Let’s not itemise all the disasters and defeats of the years, the twists and turns of a life which hasn’t panned out as neatly or as tidily as I had anticipated. Failure, fortunately, is not fatal, and chaos is not calamity. I am quite sure that if your respiratory gas of choice is oxygen, then you can provide enough examples and illustrations from your own unique experiences.  But, I wonder, how much of the fall-out of those stumbles and falls influence your current life?  How much emotional baggage do you carry from your own experiences of the terrible abyss called Failure?  Have you noticed that when, in those moments of personal crisis, we make mental agreements with our dark thoughts, we inevitably proceed into the next chapter of life with false information about ourselves?

One failed interview does not – contrary to those 3am imaginings – mean that you will be permanently unemployed; a failed driving test does not necessarily lead to perpetual use of public transport.  In the same way, a broken engagement does not mean you are incapable of a healthy long-term relationship; poor health does not make you a worthless outcast; infertility does not make you a waste of space.  Most of us know the pain of far more serious events than my third year Latin snafu. Who knows what destructive lies we tell ourselves in the bleakness of an unmet expectation, a broken dream or the ruthless reality of a future that does not match up to our long-held expectations…

I would never want to suggest these things are easy.  There is no 12 step programme in the world, no trite fridge magnet or inspirational mantra that can eradicate the tumultuous landscapes you or I have faced, and will doubtless face again when life goes awry.  It’s what we do next which is so very important.

I find this old story so encouraging: a man once watched a potter at work.  The clay was dry and difficult to work, but the artisan persevered.  In spite of all his skill and craftsmanship, there came a point when it was clear that the item he was fashioning was not up to standard.  And now the skill of the artist became clear.  Rather than rejecting the clay, scrunching it all down into a ball and throwing it carelessly into the bin, very deliberately, little by little, the calloused hands reworked the clay and refashioned the pot until it responded under his experienced hands and was revealed as a work of enormous beauty.

Failure offers us the same opportunity.  Churchill (portrayed so very brilliantly by Gary Oldman in the current Oscar nominated ‘Darkest Hour’ – go and see it as soon as you have finished reading this), was right: it does not have to be fatal. I say it again, chaos is not necessarily calamity.  Both offer me the opportunity to either despair or to dance.  Honestly, despair has the self-indulgent and seductive appeal of abandoning personal responsibility, which, briefly, makes it a highly attractive option.  Dancing – unless you are immune to the emotional fall-out of such events – requires one cold-blooded decision after another, and a major, conscious effort of the will to do so.  It necessarily begins with steps which are heavy and slow, while our wounds heal and our confidence grows. Persistence, however, reveals a rhythm and the flow of a discernible dance after all.

Like the wonky pot, so much depends not only on the choices I make in the moments of crisis and concern, but on the craftsman into whose hands I choose to submit.

* An ancient Lancastrian martial art with heavy emphasis on the use of a black pudding as weaponry. Actually created by The Goodies as a spoof of the many forms of martial art that were doing the rounds in the seventies.  (https://makeagif.com/gif/the-goodies-the-battle-of-ecky-thump-s0svHx)