Successful failure

Today's #UULent word is failure. A joke about UUs is that we read ahead in the hymnal to make sure we agree with the words we're about to sing. Well, I've been reading ahead on the list of words we've been asked to ponder, and today's is one I'd rather skip. (Especially coming a mere five days after mistakes last Friday. But we learn from our mistakes. Failure seems less noble, somehow. And isn't this a blog about joy?)

Still, I know it's spiritually useful to face the things we'd rather ignore. So this morning, as I consider failure, I'm thinking about two things: baseball and politics. Spring training opened yesterday, and my team won 7-0. Exciting! Success! Being an 18th-century Brit, Alexander Pope surely didn't have baseball in mind when he penned the phrase "hope springs eternal," yet it's perfect for a pastime that makes its annual debut in sync with this sublime season of newness.

I know that my team will lose 80 games or so this year. Everyone wants to win the World Series, but honestly, finishing over .500 is a more attainable goal. Along the way, the best hitters will succeed only a third of the time, and the best pitchers will lose at least a handful of games. But it's OK. Even the worst team in baseball will delight its fans 60 times or so before the boys of summer head home this fall. In sports, even amid failure, there's plenty of success. (Take it from Michael Jordan.)

Ten years ago, I was working as one of the nation's first paid Congressional campaign bloggers. On Election Night 2006, my candidate lost, as Democrats almost always do in Idaho -- but we had fun along the way, as this button attests. (I also remember walking in many small-town parades that summer as part of the Grant for Congress Clean-Up Crew, with our mops and brooms.)

From the candidate on down, we were a team of talented amateurs who'd suddenly turned pro. We really didn't know how to play the game, so we made a lot of mistakes. Yet on Election Night, we came within 5 percent of winning (in a district where the Dem is routinely beaten by 20 percent or more), and we helped pave the way for another, better-funded candidate with more Machiavellian management to win the next cycle.

I worked in politics for another six years, and it usually wasn't so fun. I experienced moral failure even amid victory, and many failures of imagination. I got out of the political game for good three years ago, blessed with an opportunity to return to journalism, and I won't be going back because I know that (for me, anyway), it is not soulful work.

Today, as I think about failure, I'm also thinking about a podcast I heard a few months ago with Elizabeth Gilbert and Brene Brown in which they tackled the topic at length. Brown mentions how her question used to be "What would I do if I knew I couldn't fail?" but it had evolved to "What's worth doing even if I fail?" Gilbert agrees and says we ought to let go of the idea of "it worked or it didn't work; it was a success or it wasn't a success." Of the creative life -- which of course is all of life -- Gilbert also suggests that it's better to be a trickster than a martyr. (That's another post ... or five.)

I know this baseball season will be a success because we'll all have fun along the way. I feel the same way about my return to independent writing.

My life has been a lot more joyful when I've been a trickster -- and when I've understood and embraced the concept of successful failure -- than when I've taken things way too damn seriously. I wish the same for you.