Failure

These are depressing, frustrating times for a lot of people. Those of us with a progressive perspective on things tend to feel especially thwarted. For those of you who see your place in this country as being shackled to huge muscular moron bent on destruction, self and otherwise, I offer a real life parable.

Just about anybody who has had a high school education in this country has read the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. The second version, that is. No copy of the first version survives. We only know of it by reading the commentary of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.

Apparently it was a major piece of crap.

And a flop.

One line became a running gag among the wags of Elizabethan London. As far as we can tell, Shakespeare had a much more prominent role for the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who popped up like a white-powdered jack-in-the-box and recited the line “Hamlet, revenge!” ad nauseam. Young Bill was a theatrical joke. (Steven Spielberg learned this lesson during the previews of Jaws. The mechanical shark leapt and chomped so regularly in the first cut that people started to giggle at it.)

So, Shakespeare got discouraged, went back to Stratford on Avon to take up his father’s glove-making business, and didn’t go on to become the greatest dramatist in the history of the English language.

Oh, and for those of you who believe that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays (despite the fact that he died before ten of them ever were produced): That was when Eddie said “Sod it” and went back to pederasty, sucking up to the Queen, flogging the servants, and whatever else passed for light entertainment among the nobility.

John Holt, in his excellent book How Children Fail, wrote that babies have no concept of failure. A child tries to learn to walk by repeated failed attempts. The kid grabs on to something, wobbles to an upright position, lets go, and falls on its ass. Then it does this again. And again. Eventually it manages a few steps, and pretty soon you have to keep a constant eye on the kid. No baby ever decided that it was a worthless failure and spent the rest of its life crawling.

Granted, there is physical and physiological reality. People with a higher percentage of slow twitch muscles will make better marathoners. Good luck with that perpetual motion machine. But within the bounds of natural talent, physical capability, and the laws of physics there is a lot of room for maneuvering.

There was a kid at my school who had what professionals might call a “defiant oppositional” problem. Ok, he had a hell of an attitude. When someone told him he had to do something and he really didn’t want to comply he would say, “All I gotta do is die.” In a way it is a concise piece of existential wisdom. The only real restrictions on your life are the laws of physics and the resulting chemical processes that end in your eventual death. Everything else is cultural programming, personal preference, and the consequences that you are willing to live with. Or, to put it another way, the most high security prison in the world is between your ears.

And no, I’m not one of those dupes who paid good money for “The Secret” and are wasting their time trying to wish things into existence. I’ll quote someone with a better attitude, a neighbor of mine: “The harder I work and the smarter I act, the luckier I get.”

Failure is a momentary condition. Life is an ongoing condition. Take a lesson from Shakespeare and keep going.

Comments

[Cary]

You wrote:

"the most high security prison in the world is between your ears.

And no, I’m not one of those dupes who paid good money for “The Secret” and are wasting their time trying to wish things into existence."

As a point of interest, the first of those statements actually describes the main point of The Secret. It's not really about 'wishing things into existence' so much as freeing your mind from the many self-imposed limitations we all carry around that tell us we can't or shouldn't have something in our lives, whatever it may be.

Point of clarification - I didn't buy The Secret, just perused it in the bookstore. That was all I needed to do to see that it was (like many similar books on the market lately) essentially Esoterica 101, put in terms that Joe Average wouldn't find scary: your Will, if clearly defined (for most people, a rare condition) and properly focused, can alter your reality. That is certainly something I have experienced many times. It's not Bewitched, no, but it's not random chance, either.