Falling Short
A new way to look at what it means to fall short and what else might also be true
On the Path: a weekly letter on change, nervous systems, and what it means to live a considered life. The first in a Series on Failure.
It is thirty years since Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi published Flow.
Thirty years since the images of people, and whole villages, who reported living happy lives made their way into the cultural conversation about what a good life actually looks like. And how it can come into being in anyone’s way of designing an activity.
In the decades since, our daily environments have changed almost beyond recognition.
The internet is now in your pocket.
The answers to questions can be satisfied within seconds.
Entertainment is no longer waiting for your favourite series on Thursday night prime to show the next episode.
Life is faster. Designed to satisfy us quicker.
But are we happier?
Are we satisfied?
Should we even be satisfied?
I admit to having very much enjoyed the phrase let’s google it for almost two decades now. Though now my children say: ask chat
It has put a stop to arguments about petty facts.
But it has also put a stop to something else.
The uncomfortable and slow, unresolved wondering that used to be part of being alive.
I remember distinctly writing a university essay on creativity over 20 years ago.
Drawing on one of Csikszentmihalyi’s eight conditions of flow, the one that said all individuals who entered flow were engaged in a task that was neither too easy nor too hard for them.
At first glance, to my young mind, this meant failure was excluded from the journey.
If the task was just right, I could get it just right, was my unwavering conclusion.
Get it right, without failure. (I can hear your silent laugh at that…)
A neat, safe moulding of an idea to fit what I already believed.
This is of course how we read all books at all moments of our lives.
We are inclined to interpret what we read through the lens of what we already believe.
Failure, despite my conclusions, was not excluded in the choice of a hard enough task.
It was just measured accordingly.
So that as you fail, you will persist in taking action.
This may be something each individual must measure for themselves.
Difficulty, or failure, need not be a reason to stop.
Your nervous system wiring plays a part in your ability to not stop. I wrote about that here.
The word failure comes from the Latin fallere.
To miss.
To fall short.
To escape notice.
It is also the root of false and fallible.
To fail, in its oldest sense, is not to be destroyed.
It is to be the kind of creature that misses.
That does not always see clearly.
A relief really.
Failure allows us to be human.
That is all.
Already a different conversation than the one shame wants us to have, when we fail. If shame is high on your lists to stop when facing failure read this.
In Swedish, and in the Old Norse that lives underneath it, a mistake is a miss-tag.
Att ta: to take, to grasp.
A miss-take is a wrong grasp.
You reached for something and caught the wrong thing.
Or you caught nothing at all.
No moral weight in it.
Just a misdirected hand.
And in the world of film… in this era of short videos and bloopers and behind-the-scenes reel… we all know what a miss-take means.
It also, often immediately leads to a re-take.
The miss-take is not the end of the making.
It is part of the making.
The outtake, the blooper, the moment the creator drops everything and dissolves into laughter, these have become the bread and butter of an entire creative economy.
We love them precisely because they are real.
Because they remind us that the polished version had a less polished version before it.
Always.
To err comes from the Latin errare.
To wander.
To roam.
To stray from the path.
The same root as errant and erratic.
I think of the summer sea.
The long panorama of striking light on water.
The eye sight stretching far into the horizon, that slow squinting action, reaching for something almost too far to find.
The long view.
The not-yet.
To err is to wander in that space.
And sometimes we must.
Julia Cameron, in her practice of the artist’s date, asks us to fill the well by wandering off the path on purpose.
To take ourselves somewhere new and unplanned.
To let the eye rest on something it has not been told to notice.
This wandering is not failure.
It is necessary.
The danger arrives when the wandering becomes erratic.
When we lose ourselves in the lost path.
When instead of moving onwards in awe of the unknown, we stop and turn inward and begin the other work: the shaming, the blaming, the how did I end up here again.
To err is human.
To shame ourselves for erring is a habit.
And habits, can change. And we do not have to believe that for it to be true. Actor know this and if you would like to know it too you can check out Live It First. Believe It After.
Then there is the blunder.
From Old Norse blundra: to shut one’s eyes.
To stumble around blind.
I think of Chaplin.
His character, moving through the world with eyes open and shut at the same time.
Blundering into things: a door, a dignitary, a situation entirely of the wrong kind.
And we laugh.
We recognise it.
Because we have all been there.
We all have areas of our lives where we are perfectly happy to blunder.
Where we can catch ourselves mid-stumble and laugh, and carry on.
But we also have areas where we are not happy to blunder.
Places where we have built inner dialogues that say: not here. You are not allowed to get it wrong here.
Those places are worth locating.
Not to dismantle them overnight.
But to ask, gently: who decided that?
And is it still true?
Icarus flew.
We tell the story as a warning: hubris, the sun, the fall.
But he flew.
He left the ground.
He went somewhere no one had been.
The miss-take was real.
So was the flight.
We have remembered the fall for two thousand years.
We might also remember that he flew.
Think back to a moment you look upon as a fall, a failure. A moment you were devastated by the act. What else is also true of all that was involved in that moment?
Did you also innovate? Did you also escalate? Did you also learn about yourself?
What was the flight part pf the falling?
Sisyphus pushes the boulder.
Every day it rolls back.
Albert Camus, writing in 1942, insisted we must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Not because the boulder does not roll back.
It does.
Every time.
But because the meaning is not at the summit.
The meaning is rarely ate the summit.
The meaning is in the return to the stone.
In the choosing, again, to push.
The boulder is not the punishment.
The returning is the practice.
Back to flow.
The task calibrated just right, hard enough that failure is possible, not so hard that action stops entirely.
Csikszentmihalyi was not describing a life without failure.
He was describing a life in which failure is metabolised.
Taken in, processed, and converted into the next action.
The task hard enough to stretch us.
The failure small enough, or held well enough, that we continue.
Each person must find that calibration for themselves.
It is not given.
It is practised.
And it begins, almost always, with a willingness to look at what we call failure, the word itself, the weight we have given it, the stories we have built around it, and ask whether any of that is actually true.
Fallere.
To miss.
To fall short.
To be human.
That is all.
Love and love again,
K
If this landed somewhere within the echo chambers of you, I would love to hear about it. And if you are ready to look at what failure has cost you and what it might yet give you, you can find me here for a 15 minute free call.