Splendid Failures
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This past summer my husband and I celebrated our 30th anniversary by going hiking in the mountains. Being in the mountains always reminds me of an incident on our very first backpacking trip. One morning in 1990 while my husband, Michael, was building a fire to cook breakfast, we swapped stories about childhood camping trips. I told him about my favorite camping breakfast: stick biscuits. Biscuit dough wrapped around a stick and toasted over a fire, then cut open and smothered with jam.
By the time the fire was crackling, I was mixing the dough and my mouth was watering. We hunted up a few good sticks and put on the dough. But before we’d hardly gotten our sticks over the fire, dough was starting to fall off in heavy biscuit blobs. It seemed as though I had put too much milk in the batter; the dough was too thin.
We were now out of flour, so our next idea was to add a little more milk and make the dough into pancake batter. Which we did. But then we realized that we didn’t have a frying pan in which to cook the pancakes. All we had were the metal camping pots that doubled as bowls. Our last ditch attempt, and we were getting pretty hungry by this time, was to dump the batter in a pan, add some fresh blueberries, cover it up and see what happened.
The result? The most incredible blueberry muffins I’ve ever had. Granted, we had to eat them with a spoon, but, oh, they were good. The first time these muffins were a mistake, but now I know how to make muffins over an open fire. A splendid failure.
That cooking experiment was a good spiritual lesson for me. You see, 30 years ago, I had much more absolute ideas about what constituted a success or failure. And sometimes I made the judgment call too soon. My husband, being the scientist and the experimenter, brought a different perspective. In a situation like the “stick biscuit disaster,” I could have too easily given up, thrown away the batter, gotten out the granola and milk, and started the day off a little crabby. I hadn’t really learned on a gut level that, in the words of Lewis Thomas describing DNA, “the capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel.” I wasn’t always able to hear the unexpected music formed out of the moment.
But that morning in the Rocky Mountains I started learning the lesson of “splendid failures,” the lesson that even though situations don’t turn out as I had planned, they may be salvageable. So what is it that turns plain old mistakes into splendid failures?
First of all, it helps to stay in the present. I have a neighbor who works with at-risk youth. One of the tools she gives them is yoga. She teaches them yoga so that they can learn to stay focused on their breath. Because if they can learn to really pay attention to their breathing, it begins to affect every other part of their lives. They can manage their anger and their other impulses. They can learn to take time making decisions. If they can learn to stay present to their own life-giving breath, they can better handle the stress and complexities of life. They can see ways to repair some mistakes and learn to avoid others. And if they can learn to be with their own breath, they can learn compassion, for themselves as well as others. With compassion comes forgiveness.
A second spiritual quality that seems to turn failure into success is keeping an open and flexible mind. About 15 years ago we took possession of our current family home in Minneapolis. During the years of slow renovations I splurged on some beautiful but expensive fabric roller shades for our bedroom. The problem was, I made a mistake, and the fabric I chose was too sheer and didn’t block the light. Over the years it has become harder and harder for us to sleep in a too-bright room. While doing some other house projects these past few weeks I took down an old plastic roller shade that had some cracks in the material. I was going to throw it away, but then it occurred to me that I could sew sections of that “black out” fabric to the backs of my bedroom shades. Bingo! We finally have shades that darken our room. A splendid failure.
Finally, in the case of failure, perspective matters a great deal. How we label our experiences and ourselves can either diminish us or empower us. In the wake of a failure, we can get stuck in our despair or shame. Or we can go through the natural stages of failure, which are similar to the stages of grief, and then use our new wisdom to step more wisely into the future. A failure is really nothing other than our own judgment about an event. It’s not a deep truth about our character or worth as a person. It is not a permanent state, unless we make it so. Choose a compassionate frame for your failures.
When we can approach our failures with awareness, honesty, compassion, and a willingness to learn, then they reveal small miracles to us: greater clarity about our gifts and weaknesses, and our options for the future; paths that perhaps we didn’t see before; ideas that didn’t work in one time or place, but that may work in another.
When we are able to stay in the present; keep an open and flexible mind, and choose a compassionate frame to put around our failures, then we are able to truly enjoy the muffins we never meant to make.
She loves to quilt and all kinds of creative activities, especially upcycling the old into the new. She teaches sewing in a free program for unsheltered or community sheltered folks so that they have a change to learn new skills and explore their creative selves. She recently taught a sewing class to Somali women as part of a job-training program.
Rescuing feral kittens from under a neighbor’s deck ten years ago launched her into the work of feral rescue.A few of these cats have been tamed over the course of time and have been her beloved friends. Last winter, she finally had to put down a cat she found 13 years ago on a -25 night in Minnesota. In spite of the odds, they became beloved friends and proved the impossible; many cats can be socialized and loved long after the experts say there is no hope. Her cats taught her about patience, taking one small step at a time, and the power of hope and trust.
- Splendid Failures - June 1, 2020
- Ordinary Miracles - April 1, 2018
