A lesson in failure

Sometimes you eat the Minotaur, sometimes the Minotaur eats you, as I say on p. 84 of the book. Not all Hero’s Journeys end in success. So it has happened here.

Of the various forms of ABANDONMENT, failure is the suckiest. It’s our deepest fear, those of us who MAKE THE THING THAT IS NOT, and it’s enough to keep most of us from even starting. And as failures go, this one’s not too bad since it’s more of a materials failure and not of my creative ability.

Decades ago I bought these bronze bells; they hang in the entrance to the southwest corner of the labyrinth, the little meditative nook.

The little dangly things are called “sails,” because they catch the wind and cause the bell to chime. I had to replace the originals because they were not effective at catching the wind, and the bell on the right lost its sail the last time the pole they’re hanging from slipped its bonds and fell to the ground.

To replace the missing sail, I had this idea to buy one of those slices of agate that one sees in crystal shops everywhere, drill a hole in it, and suspend that.

I bought one in Dahlonega a couple of months ago, bought a stone/ceramic drill bit, and got to drilling. It was very slow work, just little bits of agate dust at a time.

Yesterday, with the weather as lovely as it was, I brought out the drill and the agate and got back to work. It was very slow work. I could tell that I was not even halfway through this 1/8” slice of rock.

So I dragged out the drill press and after a couple of frustrating adjustments got to work using the power of a big tool to get the job done.

The agate immediately shattered.

As I said above, this is not exactly a soul-crushing failure. I’ll find another use for these fragments and start over with a fresh piece of agate, perhaps asking around the various granite/marble places around here if they have small drill bits that could do the job efficiently.

But what if it were a bigger kind of failure? Like the time I directed A Little Hotel on the Side (Feydeau) for my 25th anniversary production: it was so bad that on the final Saturday night performance I went to a neighborhood Halloween party rather than go to my own show. (In my defense, it was all due to the main character’s inability to memorize lines. A Feydeau farce cannot be improvised.)

Or my arrangement of the hymn tune Resignation for the visiting Ayrshire Fiddle Orchestra, which received a tepid performance and reception back in 2011.

As embarrassing as these were, they didn’t stop me from directing or composing again, nor should my fear of that level of embarrassment have prevented me from Little Hotel or Resignation in the first place.

How am I so sanguine about failure? As I have told my Midsummer Night’s Dream cast, stop worrying about failure, because even if we sink like a stone, no one is losing a million dollars over this. No one’s losing anything except the time we put into exploring our art — and that is not time wasted.

And as I say on p.112 of the book, “You have not failed; you have ABANDONED work that is no longer your work. Real artists know this. ABANDONING your work doesn’t make you less of an artist; it makes you more.”

Failure is always an option.