(A piece by Elijah, for Scrapped June 2023 Issue)
15 years ago, May 22nd 2008, I was 22, and it was the eve of my wedding night.
I was really worried that my now ex-wife wasn’t going to marry me the next day.
We’d both had cold feet and our last conversation left me feeling dubious about whether or not I would see her walking down the aisle.
In July of 2013 we experienced the end of our marriage.
It felt like an answer to what our intuition knew, but our experience had to prove.
Strangely enough, I am profoundly grateful I experienced such a failure at such a young age. At that time in my life, being a divorced person was one of my deepest fears. I was convinced that it was all I'd ever be.
As Americans in the 21st century, we carry such shame around failure; it’s almost as if we forgot that we had to learn how to walk, which requires falling down, and then stubbornly getting back up and falling down… again… and again…
After my divorce I threw myself completely into my craft; I had great days of writing music, and I had terrible days. I would chase ideas, and then I’d realize that I didn’t like the direction, so I’d throw away weeks of work.
I was in this new place of exploration around my craft, and it was like falling in love. Even the hard days were good.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but in hindsight I can see that my craft has been shaping me: similar to how I shape a piece, teaching me patience, playfulness, and a ferocity for the joy of the process. Shifting my thinking from “I wasted all this time” to “ok, this is good information.” I cannot say with any integrity that I have arrived.
But sometimes I glimpse that grief, despair, joy, frustration, failure are all a part of this absurd human experience.
Did you know that right now we are hurtling through space on a rock?
We are traveling approx. 67,000 miles per hour.
Just for a point of reference, the fastest you’ve ever traveled is likely between 600 - 700 mph, an average commercial airliner. Like 1ish percent?
Did you know that if the earth were just a bit larger or just a bit smaller it wouldn’t be able to sustain life?
If the Moon, the Sun, and Jupiter were all different sizes or ratios, life on earth could not exist?
Carbon, an essential element to our skeletal structure, only exists on earth because the earth collided with a smaller planet about 4.4 billion years ago?
And some days we are mad because we can’t find our car keys!
This whole thing is a fucking absurd miracle.
This whole goddamn thing.
I bring this up because I recognize that our lives as humans on planet Earth in 2023 are a result of so many “failures.” Failures of stars billions of years before us, colliding with other failed stars giving us the elements that are essential to our existence. Failures of other solar systems having wrong-sized planets, stars, moons. A planet with maybe exact solar dimensions like ours, but the carbon-planet collision never happened.
We are so addicted to and entrenched in the idea that success means fame, wealth, power. It’s hard to see that failure is normal. Trial and error are essential ways that we learn, that the universe learns. Sometimes failures are catastrophic, sometimes they are pleasantly surprising. Sometimes they are weirdly both.
I asked a friend of mine to review this article before I submitted it, and she mentioned how,
“As a math teacher the best lessons came from students making mistakes and seeking to understand where they went wrong. I would celebrate any error/mistake and encourage students to share ‘how they messed up’ with the class. Great power in realizing you aren’t the only one who made a mistake – I’d get others to admit they made the same mistake. I’d even have lessons about ‘what is your greatest weakness’ so students knew where they really needed to double check their work. Failure is such a key to success! We need a paradigm shift in how we view failure.”
So I say let us refuse to let failure dictate what we do. Ask your crush out, ruin the fresh pages in your sketchbook, disappoint the expectations that have ruled you with relentless tyranny.
Allow yourself the freedom to be the wide range of the human experience. Sometimes it hurts, or embarasses us, or breaks our entire understanding, but it always leads to something else; I’m not sure about much, but I do know that.
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final.” (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Elijah Perdomo (Sound Magician)
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