I am thinking about failure these days.  This is partly because I have had a few lately, but mostly because I just finished Costica Bradatan’s very interesting new book, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility.  Bradatan sees failure as necessary because it grounds us in reality and brings us humility.  He cites Iris Murdoch’s definition of humility as “selfless respect for reality.”  (Murdoch thinks that humility is “the most difficult and central of all virtues.”)

Bradatan says failure begets humility in three phases:

1. Humility involves acceptance of our cosmic insignificance.
2. It puts us on firm ground, since we have been “brought down to earth.”
3. Having lowered our anchor into the world, and regained our existential balance, we can move on to other, bigger things.

Bradatan also notes that “Humility is the opposite of humiliation – that’s the chief lesson…There is nothing demeaning or inglorious about humility; on the contrary, it is rejuvenating, enriching, emboldening.”

I certainly am interested in “regaining my existential balance,” so this got my attention.  I was also interested in the way that we often reference old age as some kind of failure.  We talk about old folks failing to thrive, having failing eyesight, experiencing organ failure.  Much about old age unfolds with small failures, a dripping faucet of losses.  I used to be able to reach that shelf, didn’t I?  Remember that word?  Walk up that hill without pausing for breath?  Bradatan does not reference old age often in his work, but he is reassuring that failure grounds us and serves us in ways that success never can.

Failure is defined in the dictionary as “unsuccessful at reaching one’s goal.” Is staying young, staying alive, a goal?  It certainly is not within our complete control. We are mortal, and we will age, whether we like it or not.   We may have some control over the rate of decline, but not over the inevitability of it – Silicon Valley notwithstanding.

And how do we handle this sense of failing?  We are bombarded with contradictory messages.  Some say we should try harder, accept new challenges, revolutionize our diets.  Others posit that we should practice a reasonable level of acceptance. David Chernikoff in his Life, Part 2, shares this wonderful quote, a prose-poem really, from Solzhenitsyn:

How much easier it is then, how much more receptive we are to death, when advancing years guide us softly to our end. Aging thus is in no sense a punishment from on high, but brings its own blessings and a warmth of colors all its own. . .. There is even warmth to be drawn from the waning of your own strength compared with the past—just to think how sturdy I once used to be! You can no longer get through a whole day’s work at a stretch, but how good it is to slip into the brief oblivion of sleep, and what a gift to wake once more to the clarity of your second or third morning of the day. And your spirit can find delight in limiting your intake of food, in abandoning the pursuit of novel flavors. You are still of this life, yet you are rising above the material plane. . .. Growing old serenely is not a downhill path but an ascent.

Uphill, downhill.  Success, failure. Do these words have any meaning in relation to human existence?  Life is a parabola according to Dante; we go up, we go down.  Almost a millennium after Dante, Joni Mitchell said life is a “game,” not a tragedy, and as the “painted ponies go up and down”:

We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look
Behind, from where we came
And go round and round and round, in the circle game.

I think there can be joy in the motion, whichever side of the circle or parabola you are on. Yes, we must “accept” the end of a season, of our youth.  We either have to change our view of failure in relation to age, or start to use another word.  “Growing old serenely,” says Solzhenitsyn, “is not a downhill path but an ascent.”

And, if we are willing, we may find happiness in the falling, the failing, the downhill path. I have listened to many dharma talks about withholding judgment on all changes, including age. Rather than judge, we are to watch, realize.  Serenely.  A good word.  Like equanimity.

One last note: my last two blogs have started with the term “in praise of” – ordinary times, failure.  One cannot neglect mentioning Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly – the most memorable of such encomiums. In it, Erasmus’s discussion of old age almost always puts it into the context of the life cycle.  Lack of decorum in relation to one’s place in the life cycle is a constant source of humor for Folly.  Folly holds up the futile attempts of the elderly to be what they are not: “They cling to life so fiercely, and try so hard to ‘seem young,’ that one old codger will dye his last gray hairs, while another will stick a wig on his pate, and still another will fill his gums with false teeth, borrowed perhaps from a pig’s jaw.”  Erasmus, too, is cautioning a level of acceptance and equanimity.

For more on Dante’s view of life as a parabola, you might look at my blogs, “Dante’s Parabola” or “A Diminished Thing.”