|
LEARNING FROM FAILURE, by Mary Grigolia |
ICE SKATING
As a teen-ager I loved to go ice skating on the pond at Eastern College, which was about a mile down the road where my parents lived. I especially liked it when the students were gone over the January winter break. The pond had frozen over. I would wander down in the afternoon after school, frequently having the pond to myself. I was never a good skater. But I had a good imagination. I enjoyed the speed, the thrill of skating over the bumpy ice.
Years later, I took my children and a small group of their friends to the local ice rink for my son’s birthday. We rented skates for everyone. I helped the kids put on their skates. Put on my own. And returned to the ice after 20 years. Most of the kids had never skated before. For the first half hour, the novices spent as much time skidding on their butts as skating on their feet. Falling didn’t seem to deter their sense of enjoyment or damage their sense of self. I, on the other hand, skated carefully round and round, becoming progressively more attached to staying up-right. Priding myself on not falling down. I didn’t fall once. I also didn’t have a very good time. I was bound up in fear of falling. A fear of failing.
I remember rationalizing my fear by thinking of myself as a model of adult balance for the children. But the children weren’t fooled.
THE SMALLEST BUDDHIST TEACHER MASTERS
We who are parents or teachers or adults who live in community with children take seriously the responsibility of teaching our children how to live successfully in the world. How to be whole people, physically, emotionally, spiritually. It is humbling to watch a baby learn how to walk. This young human will show us just who the spiritual master is. What adult is able to try a new move over and over unsuccessfully, without feeling bad about ourselves and then taking it out on our friends and families? Babies have a lot to teach us spiritually about the role of failure and success, about how failure is information gathering pre-requisite to success. For all the responsibilities we adults have to the children in our lives, one of the most important is being open enough to allow them to help us unlearn our misconceptions about success and failure. Children are sometimes the most profound spiritual teachers.
PLEASANTVILLE
In the film “Pleasantville,” two teen-agers who dream of escaping the emotional turmoil in their lives find themselves transported to Pleasantville, their favorite 1950s TV series about a place where everything always goes right and nothing ever changes. Everything in Pleasantville is in black and white. At first, the kids love it. But gradually they start to feel constrained. On the high school basketball court, every shot goes in. That’s when the two kids from the real world finally had enough. They purposely miss a basket, in order to shake things up, make things more interesting. The unexpected produces anxiety. And color starts appearing. The message? Real success only comes from daring to fail, trying something new, being willing to venture into unknown territory.
HOW WE LEARN
As Neal wrote, we don’t learn from our successes. We learn from mistakes, failures. We know that this is how babies learn to walk. We know that the brain is hardwired for walking and so we relegate this experience to dubious science about how the brain develops and ignore its underlying lesson.
In a similar way, we discount our experience with language acquisition. We know that the lobe of the brain where language happens grows at an astounding rate in young children. We make the assumption that learning language is something that the brain just does, and that language and associated skills – like music -- must be learned during these early years of brain development.
LEARNING AND MISTAKES ARE RESTRICTED TO THE VERY YOUNG
We assume that after those initial years of language acquisition, this part of the brain stops growing and so our ability to learn new languages or pick up an instrument is curtailed. In fact, with motivation and support, anyone of us can always learn new languages or musical instruments. Our local NPR station was interviewing Ravi Coltrane, the jazz musician, when he was in Cleveland several months ago. Ravi is the son of John Coltrane, the legendary jazz player and composer. The interviewer had assumed that Ravi started playing as a child since he had grown up in a household where both parents where professional jazz performers. In fact, Ravi didn’t start playing until he was 20, well past the peak in the part of the brain dedicated to music.
THE CULTURAL DIVIDE
There’s a cultural divide about how we learn and what we expect of ourselves and of each other. On one side of the divide is the philosophy that learning is a linear, physical task. It relegates trial and error to the young. Once past a certain age, you are expected to be complete. And to do the right thing. To make no mistakes. Right and wrong are clear cut. Morality and identity are held to be fixed. This view is held by those who believe the Bible is the literal word of God, and whose understanding of God is of a being who lives outside of the world yet who at a point in the distant past dictated the rules of morality for all time. If you deviate from these rules, according to their interpretation, this remote God damns you to eternal punishment.
On the other side is the view that we are always learning about the world and creating from our experiences an evolving sense of self. This view posits that we don’t learn in a neat linear way, but in a cyclical way, with cycles of creation, consolidation, testing and destruction.
I interned in a congregation with a large teen program. The kids dressed in amazing outfits; their hair was all kinds of interesting colors and shapes. They were vividly alive, not just in how they looked on the outside, but in the different ideas and philosophies and life-styles they were trying on emotionally, politically, socially. For the most part, these were kids who were being raised in UU households. They were respected and held responsible as individuals within a caring yet not confining community. This was quite unlike my own up-bringing and that of many adults who have flocked to UU congregations. For us, the teen years were largely the years of rebelling against our parents’ limiting rules of how we could behave and what we should think. I wondered about the purpose of being in a UU youth group for these children?
I’ll always remember Gretchen’s explanation: One of the young group leaders of YRUU, Young Religious Unitarian Universalists, she said that YRUU provides a safe place for teens to try on different cultural identities. The young person can live in that disguise for awhile, and if it feels right to them internally and if they like the way the community responds to them, they can maintain it. If not, they can try on another style of self-expression.
After a certain point, we expect ourselves to have the answers and abilities. To do things right. We make the mistake of assuming that all of life’s lessons are learned early and that after the age of legal maturity, we no longer learn from our mistakes. What we do, instead, is hide them.
ELECTION
Abe Lincoln is often cited as a moral exemplar by people from all points along the social and political spectra. It’s interesting to remember that he lost many times before election to public office. He succeeded only because he was willing to fail and to learn from his failings.
Like many Americans, I dread the presidential election, with the manipulation of the voters and the posturing about the so-called morality of the president.
We make a dangerous assumption that only those who have never done anything wrong can be our leaders.
As a society, we are changing demographically at a dizzying speed. Economically, we’re looking at fundamental changes in how we do business, both because of the internet and because of globalization. Politically, the world is in turmoil, with the very real possibility that the former Soviet Union could revert to dictatorship at any time. The human population is straining the world’s resources and the balance of the ecosystem.
This political situation calls for real leadership, for people willing to learn from their mistakes and from our collective mistakes. What makes for a good leader, a moral president, a moral parent, a moral citizen, isn’t creating a squeaky clean persona because you’re terrified of making a mistake. What’s important is that determination to self-improvement and self-awareness that Neal respects in Pat.
If a young person takes drugs at some point in their life and later goes into public service, imagine what a positive impact they could have on young drug users if they were willing to be honest about the soul-searching and the physical and emotional impact their drug use had on their life, on their families.
What if we had leaders that were willing to show their humanity? Perhaps the most powerful affect we have on each other is when we share how we have grown from our failures.
Young people are always going to be tempted to experiment with mind-altering substances. People of many different ages have to deal with the intricate emotional challenge of living in a committed relationship with another evolving human being; adults will always be tempted to test the limits of monogamy.
I imagine the possibility and implications of having role models who have the courage to do the work of self-exploration and who have learned from their own painful choices.
Like all cultures, we expect our leaders to be strong. I imagine us reframing our cultural model of strength to include the willingness to learn from our weaknesses, our difficult choices. How redemptive for our young people struggling with drugs or families struggling with infidelity or betrayal if our cultural leaders modeled learning from our choices. What if the muck-raking in our political campaigns focused not on whether you made mistakes, but what you learned from the choices in your life and whether you were willing to help your constituents who are wrestling with the same choices?
Let us not be afraid of our mistakes. Whether we are on the ice with a birthday party of 8 year olds. Or daring to pick up a piece of music that’s beyond our technical expertise. Let us help create a culture where we support one another in making sense of our painful choices. This is how we build real moral muscles, not because someone threatens to disclose our sins, but because we are willing to learn from our lives. And because we choose to live as morally responsible members of a supportive, and just community. AMEN.