Failures and failings
Failure and the Loon know each other decidedly well. They are not friends, exactly, but on this Day for Failure the Loon must acknowledge that failure has imparted lessons she appreciates, even as she rues the manner of their communication.
The Loon finds the notion of “celebrating” failure twee and annoying. She can’t be happy about all the things she’s failed at; they were important things, most of them, and she’d vastly rather have succeeded. Nonetheless, she’s made a practice of accepting failure, when it happens, for nearly twenty years, and that she does recommend.
It’s better than the alternatives. Taking insufficient risk is the often-mentioned dark sibling of excessive failure avoidance, and the Loon agrees it’s dire. Just as bad, though, is the nervous restless needy endless wearisome struggle to nail down every detail, resolve every last uncertainty, before a task can be essayed, lest it fail. The Loon’s students are given to this (this year more than most, for some reason), and she wishes desperately they would stop. They waste ridiculous amounts of mental effort on failure avoidance that the Loon wishes they’d spend on—well, play. Play and experimentation and spontaneous discovery.
The Loon admits she’s been rather short with some of her students over this of late. Rather than adduce all the usual excuses for her poor temper, she admits that poor temper is a failing of hers—not a discrete individual failure, but a consistent, damaging, lessonless failing. The Loon doesn’t much fear most sorts of failures; she most certainly does fear and loathe her own failings, temper certainly the worst of the lot.
So, idiosyncratic creature that she is, what she’ll celebrate this day is her own effort to curb her failings—yes, even recognizing that she often fails at it; she couldn’t fail if she weren’t trying—as well as the similar efforts of others. May we all do better by ourselves and others.