I knew I'd have to get round to it eventually, and a rainy Tuesday morning with the conservatory roof making even a light shower sound like the end of days seems to be as good a time as any. I'd like to talk about failure.
Regular readers will recall that at the start of last year I set myself a variety of challenges to accomplish in 2018: reading fifty books, running 1500 miles and spotting at least 200 separate bird species. You will be unsurprised to hear that I failed signally in each and every one of them.
For the record, I managed just over 1000 miles, read 32 books and saw about 102 species. So, by any stretch of the imagination, I fell a long way short. I failed. But then, I always rather suspected I would. the purpose of these arbitrary targets, as I wrote at the time, was more to stimulate myself into getting stuff done; getting out there and interacting with the world with the running and the birds, enriching my inner life and getting back into reading as opposed to aimlessly scrolling through social media. In this, they worked pretty well (even if I look back upon the plan to blog each book and note with now small degree of embarrassment that THAT masterstroke petered out at book number 14). I still scroll aimlessly through social media, but appear to have got a touch of my literary mojo back, even if I'm aware that this is now strictly for my own amusement rather than any wider ambition.
The whole thing was about discovering, or re-discovering, a sense of self, having been subsumed in the total immersion of running a business and starting a family for a decade. Now, this may sound incredibly selfish, but in my defence I'd like to point out that I took pains to make sure that none of my personal quests impinged on family time - I wasn't off running when there were dishes to do. Indeed, the bird list became a family thing.
It was round about October when I realised that I was too far behind to catch up on any of them. In my line of work you can pretty much forget about trying to do anything in December. I felt, as I have so often in my life, the dread intimation of failure looming, like an iceberg, ahead. Why had I done this to myself? Why had I chosen to do so publicly? Well, any number of reasons, not least of which was to give me something to write about. But the truth is I don't actually have much of a problem with failure, it's something I've got pretty good at down the years.
As a monstrously arrogant young man (in my defence I'd had a good few years of everyone telling me how brilliant I was, it's enough to turn anyone's head) it came as something of a shock to discover that I was pretty run of the mill as thinkers go. Reasonably bright, nothing special. Luckily, I quickly became preoccupied with more urgent matters, viz. repaying student loans and having enough money left to get utterly out of my tree. That was the twenties taken care of and I was, by the standards of the promise of my youth, very definitely a failure. Then came the age of responsibility: marriage, kids and starting a business. That was the thirties taken care of, and by the end of that, given that said business wasn't worth carrying on with, you'd have to go, yup, failure, though please note that I am speaking strictly in professional terms, I've got three great kids and a still intact marriage, which, given how my thirties panned out as a whole, constitutes something of a win. Never did get round to writing that novel, though.
And now here I am at the start of my forties. An even more navel-gazing period of a life which was already pretty solipsistic to start off with, and in something of what I believe is referred to euphemistically in football circles as a rebuilding period. By the standards of what we are sold as the ideal life, I'm very much a failure. No big house, no expensive holidays, no car. I'm not particularly well off and I certainly haven't accomplished any of the big things that were predicted for me all those years ago. But what I have learned is that all of that is, largely, unimportant (I'm going to avoid making the obvious points about family and friends here, you've probably sussed that one long ago). I've discovered that what's important to me, more than anything else, is trying, it's knowing that I'm giving myself a chance rather than doing nothing at all. It's why I keep pottering along with this widely ignored blog, why I keep getting up early to slog through a run before the family wake up, why I get the odd little book out every few years (there's another one coming in May, btw). It's all doomed to failure, of course, but's not really the point, is it?
Regular readers will recall that at the start of last year I set myself a variety of challenges to accomplish in 2018: reading fifty books, running 1500 miles and spotting at least 200 separate bird species. You will be unsurprised to hear that I failed signally in each and every one of them.
For the record, I managed just over 1000 miles, read 32 books and saw about 102 species. So, by any stretch of the imagination, I fell a long way short. I failed. But then, I always rather suspected I would. the purpose of these arbitrary targets, as I wrote at the time, was more to stimulate myself into getting stuff done; getting out there and interacting with the world with the running and the birds, enriching my inner life and getting back into reading as opposed to aimlessly scrolling through social media. In this, they worked pretty well (even if I look back upon the plan to blog each book and note with now small degree of embarrassment that THAT masterstroke petered out at book number 14). I still scroll aimlessly through social media, but appear to have got a touch of my literary mojo back, even if I'm aware that this is now strictly for my own amusement rather than any wider ambition.
The whole thing was about discovering, or re-discovering, a sense of self, having been subsumed in the total immersion of running a business and starting a family for a decade. Now, this may sound incredibly selfish, but in my defence I'd like to point out that I took pains to make sure that none of my personal quests impinged on family time - I wasn't off running when there were dishes to do. Indeed, the bird list became a family thing.
It was round about October when I realised that I was too far behind to catch up on any of them. In my line of work you can pretty much forget about trying to do anything in December. I felt, as I have so often in my life, the dread intimation of failure looming, like an iceberg, ahead. Why had I done this to myself? Why had I chosen to do so publicly? Well, any number of reasons, not least of which was to give me something to write about. But the truth is I don't actually have much of a problem with failure, it's something I've got pretty good at down the years.
As a monstrously arrogant young man (in my defence I'd had a good few years of everyone telling me how brilliant I was, it's enough to turn anyone's head) it came as something of a shock to discover that I was pretty run of the mill as thinkers go. Reasonably bright, nothing special. Luckily, I quickly became preoccupied with more urgent matters, viz. repaying student loans and having enough money left to get utterly out of my tree. That was the twenties taken care of and I was, by the standards of the promise of my youth, very definitely a failure. Then came the age of responsibility: marriage, kids and starting a business. That was the thirties taken care of, and by the end of that, given that said business wasn't worth carrying on with, you'd have to go, yup, failure, though please note that I am speaking strictly in professional terms, I've got three great kids and a still intact marriage, which, given how my thirties panned out as a whole, constitutes something of a win. Never did get round to writing that novel, though.
And now here I am at the start of my forties. An even more navel-gazing period of a life which was already pretty solipsistic to start off with, and in something of what I believe is referred to euphemistically in football circles as a rebuilding period. By the standards of what we are sold as the ideal life, I'm very much a failure. No big house, no expensive holidays, no car. I'm not particularly well off and I certainly haven't accomplished any of the big things that were predicted for me all those years ago. But what I have learned is that all of that is, largely, unimportant (I'm going to avoid making the obvious points about family and friends here, you've probably sussed that one long ago). I've discovered that what's important to me, more than anything else, is trying, it's knowing that I'm giving myself a chance rather than doing nothing at all. It's why I keep pottering along with this widely ignored blog, why I keep getting up early to slog through a run before the family wake up, why I get the odd little book out every few years (there's another one coming in May, btw). It's all doomed to failure, of course, but's not really the point, is it?
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