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Tuesday 2 April 2013

You may have taken a wrong turning...



Unfortunately you may have missed your turn-off, or perhaps you've come off the motorway too soon, because somehow you've ended up on my road. But welcome! You might as well pootle along in this direction for a little while since you're here now. 

Fingerposts on the Road is a blog about my attempts to navigate through life. One might have hoped that a blog entitled 'Fingerposts on the Road' would be an instructive, handy set of pointers for how to live life with direction, purpose and success. Alas, no. For all I know, there may well be another equally charmingly-entitled blog which in fact does provide such a service. Unfortunately, the fingerposts to which I am referring are mistakes. In bestowing the aforementioned title on this blog, I have lovingly plagiarised honoured C.S. Lewis, who wrote that 'failures are fingerposts on the road to achievement'. 


So why am I writing a blog about failures? For the precise reason that it seems odd to blog about making a complete hash of things. We, rightly, celebrate the good things in life: our achievements, successes, joys. When someone asks me, 'how are you?', I don't usually reply: 'Well, actually, not so good because I have just put my foot in it with my boss, every time I look at my hair in the mirror I see split ends and a bus inconsiderately sprayed me with rainwater at 8:46 this morning.' 'Fine' is much easier (and has the added advantage of not requiring half as much vocal enthusiasm). Facebook provides us with a never-ending stream of smiling faces, cupcakes, holidays, birthdays, parties and casual references to truly impressive lives. Even the bad moments in my day are usually censored according to the Facebook Test - if they fulfil the criteria of being humorous and not too embarrassing, they are worthy of publication. If they make me uncomfortably vulnerable, they must stay within the realm of private experience. 

Now, there's nothing wrong with that. Not at all. The problem is not that intensely personal dark moments are kept private, but that so much else is now public. And this can distort my perception. Because human experience now seems so easily visible, I forget that what I can see is not actually the full picture, but rather the part which we feel happy to share.  


So, back to the question: why am I writing a blog about failures? Quite simply, because nothing has helped me so much as gradually coming to a vague awareness that I'm not the only one who often gets scared, grumpy, embarrassed, sad, frustrated, and baffled; and my hope is that, perhaps, by writing about these frequent moments in my life, they might encourage someone else too.  


Also, I'm not very good at converting failures into fingerposts. They tend to stay stuck at the 'failure' (/example of idiocy/major embarrassment/source of STRESS) stage in my mind. Now, I often find that - whether I like it or not - the things I get wrong do lead me to a better place than I would otherwise have found myself in. In fact, I have a suspicion that the One I trust the most is the one who does this failure-to-fingerpost transformation. So I'm also hoping that maybe if I write about my attempts to muddle through I'll begin to see life from His perspective a little bit sooner. 

1 comment:

  1. I really like the idea of a blog about failures.

    I was thinking about the word failure the other day. I was sat at a computer where I had taken a test on computer productivity and the word FAIL was written in red writing on the screen. Looking back, the difference between that FAIL and PASS was a feeling. Did it matter if I failed? No, after all, I was given three attempts to succeed and on my second I didn't just pass but I passed with flying colours. What mattered was that failure felt like the worst thing in the world for that moment in time.

    I think it's perfect natural to stay stuck in that moment, to feel the embarrassment/idiocy that can be associated with failure.

    And the most important thing, as you say, is the conversion. Whether it's easy to do or not, perhaps in the long run we may learn from our 'failure' but don't necessarily realise it.

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