Learning to Fall
by Rev. Colin Bossen, January 25, 2009
Over the last year I have watched my son learn to walk. We humans are not born ready for this feat. Walking is something that comes to us as we age and as we struggle, through trial-and-error, to master the basic skills necessary for self-propulsion.
It takes perseverance to learn to walk. The skill is not acquired all at once. Rather it unfolds as muscles gradually strengthen and coordination slowly improves. Before he learned to walk Asa first had to learn how to sit upright, to crawl and to stand. Finally before he took his first steps he began to cruise. Cruising, in the parlance of the parents of toddlers, is the practice of grasping at coffee table, piano bench and covered radiator edges in order to inch along their perimeters. Cruising allows toddlers the opportunity to practice putting one foot in front of another. Asa first steps free from such helpful supports were met with the downward tug of gravity. A first step almost certainly results in an earthly fall.
Falling is part of learning to walk. In order to learn to walk Asa had to learn to fall. He could not be discouraged by his constant encounters with the floor. He had to be comfortable with his failures until at last he achieved his goal. Watching Asa learn to walk I was reminded that failure is a natural part of our lives. It is only inhibiting when we let it stop us from trying again. As one adage runs, "Success consists of getting up just one more time than you fall."
As we age we often become afraid of failure. "I tried that once and it didn't work," someone will say. "We should not do that. There's no way it will succeed," pipes another. When questioned such proclaimers usually reveal that there is some fear behind their refusal to engage with action. They have fallen in the past. Rather than stand up and try again it seems like it will easier to refrain from action. In doing so they will avoid the bruises that come with failure.
Failure proceeds success. If we are to succeed we must, almost always, first fail. I was reminded of this several years ago when I set out to learn Spanish.
I went to Xalapa, Mexico to learn the language. I had studied it in high school and college and I had passing familiarity with it. But I decided that if I was ever going to really learn the language I needed to immerse myself in it. So I enrolled an a Spanish immersion program and did my best to only speak the language for about two months.
Now, learning a new language requires a certain fearlessness and doggedness. One must be willing to accept humiliation and embarrassment. As I took my first steps towards conversational Spanish I jumbled my words, mixed-up my verbs with nouns, confused the present with the past and future tenses and generally made a fool of myself.
One of my more embarrassing moments came after I finished my course. A friend of mine, a graduate student at local university, invited me to have dinner at her house. She lived with her mother.
At that point my Spanish was good enough to get me through a basic conversation. If our discourse strayed beyond a fairly limited number of topics I quickly became lost. In order to improve my grasp of the language I was constantly on the outlook for new additions to my vocabulary.
Shortly before I was to dine with my friend I acquired a word that I thought was a synonym for a lot. When I am excited I have a tendency to be prone to hyperbole. So I was glad to have more than one way of saying "There were a lot of people at the jazz club" or "I would like to have a lot of guacamole on my taco."
During dinner I used my new word a couple of times. Whenever I used it I was met with polite but pointed looks. After dinner my friend was kind enough to explain to me what the word actually meant. She inquired if I could define the word. I said I thought it meant "a lot." She informed me that it indeed did mean this but that it was, in fact, a swear word, a "grosería." Roughly translated into English the word meant a large bowel movement. I was horrified. I apologized to my friend and her mother. They were both somewhat bemused.
My mistake did not end my efforts to learn Spanish or acquire new Spanish words. It did cause me to become a little more conservative in implementing new additions to my vocabulary. I made a point of looking them up in a dictionary before I started to use them in public.
Our imperfections, our ability to fail, is one of the things that makes us human. John Milton's epic poem "Paradise Lost" can be seen as a tribute to fallibility. The poem, as you may remember, recounts both Satan's failed rebellion against God and descent to Hell and Adam and Eve's disobedience to God and their casting out of the Garden of Eden. In Milton's telling, derived from Genesis, humans would have never left the Garden of Eden if Adam and Eve had not failed in their obedience God. Human history really starts with this failure and with the loss of Eden.
Adam and Eve fail in obedience to God because they are told that they may do whatever they like in the Garden of Eden as long as they do not eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Tempted by Satan, and perhaps framed by God, they inevitable do eat the fruit of the tree. They learn about both Good and Evil and, as a result, God banishes them from the Garden and revokes their immortality. Shortly before Adam is cast out of Eden, the Archangel Michael shows him a vision of how human history is to unfold because of Adam's failure. That history is to culminate in the final victory of God and the Son of God over Satan. In response to the vision Adam says:
O goodness infinite, goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good; more wonderful
Then that by which creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness! full of doubt I stand,
Whether I should repent me now of sin
By mee done and occasiond, or rejoyce
Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring
Adam is elated that his failure will bring about such great things in the future. Through him Milton seems to imply without Adam and Eve's first failure the eventual victory of God over Satan would not occur. Likewise, without that failure there would be no civilization, no culture, no poetry. Sometimes from the greatest failures come the greatest successes.
"Paradise Lost" is a complicated poem. There are many different ways to interpret it. One interpretation is that the poem's true hero is Satan. If Satan had not rebelled against God then he would never have been driven from Heaven into Hell. If there was no fallen angel to proclaim "Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n" then there would have been no one to champion free choice and convince Eve to taste of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Satan's failure in obedience to God is then the starting point of human history. In that first failure, if one follows the myth, begins all of humanity's accomplishments.
Reflecting on "Paradise Lost," William Blake penned "Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell...he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." Milton's language does indeed soar when he writes of Satan and Hell. The Devil and his cohorts are more attractive characters than God and his minions. I am not sure that this makes Satan the poem's hero. But it does suggest to me that, perhaps, there is a lesson embedded in Blake's analysis. If Milton was sympathetic with the Devil it may have been because as an artist he intimately familiar with failure. He understood Satan's flawed nature far better than he grasped God's perfection.
A professor of mine in college used to quote a critic, I forgot which one, who wrote "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." There is a certain sense in which I suspect the critic is correct. On some level all art is probably a failure. The finished product--the poem, the painting, the photograph--never quite captures the vision held in the artist's mind. One of the hallmarks of a great artist is how she incorporates her failures into her work.
Pablo Picasso was, reportedly, adapt at this. He is regarded as one of the 20th century masters of printmaking and yet he had not formal training as printmaker. Reviewing a show of Picasso's print works in the Daily Telegraph the art critic Richard Dorment describes how Picasso "used his own inexperience to his advantage" and integrated his mistakes into his pieces. Describing one celebrated print Dorment writes, "he made the mistake of gouging his lines so deeply that tiny bubbles became trapped during the acid-etching process--an effect another artist might have rejected because it looks as though the surface of the print has been stained with drops of water. But Picasso realized that drip marks resembling sea spray or raindrops suited...a postcard-size scene showing young girls playing by the seaside."
Accepting the mistakes that he made as part of his art work is one of things that made Picasso a great artist. It allowed him to be comfortable with the unexpected and accept that he did not have control over the final product that he created. He appears not to have been afraid that his pieces would fail. Rather he let his failure be part of his pieces.
Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies once defined "a miracle [as] the maximum result for the minimum effort." We cannot expect too many of those kinds of miracles in our lives. Instead we must embrace failure when it comes, realize that it is necessary for success and choose to learn from it. This is something that we are already familiar with. We learned about failure the first time we tried to walk or speak a language. Our falls should not stop us. They should be accompanied by our efforts to stand back up and take another step.
The closing passage of "Paradise Lost," describing how Adam and Eve leave the Garden, reads:
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.
Adam and Eve's failure marks the true beginning of their lives. May our failures teach us the same lesson. May they provide us with a starting point. May they not prevent us from reaching our goals. And may they remind us that the world is all before us.
Amen and Blessed Be.