The Multitude of Things…

My mother Mary posted a comment to my last blog posting that read, “I need to remember now and then to honor my accomplishments and accept my failures and the multitude of things that fall between the two.” This got me thinking about “the multitude of things that fall between the two.” Between accomplishment and failure? I suppose so.

That led me to ask the following question: “What is accomplishment and what is failure?” And, a follow-up question: “Are they always (or ever) that easy to name or recognize or categorize?” For instance, what today might feel or seem like a failure might, in fact, be the first step in what will, one day, end up being a great success or a source of great happiness. How are we to know in the myopic vision of this precise moment? And isn’t it equally possible that that which we look at today as an “accomplishment” might tomorrow seem a mere triviality or a step along a long and winding (to borrow from Paul McCartney) road to a yet to be determined destination? Maybe it wasn’t so much an accomplishment as a crucial or critical stepping stone.

Yes, I agree that we need to honor our accomplishments and accept our failures. Absolutely. No argument. I also think that we need to allow ourselves to color outside of the lines every now and again and to realize that perhaps not everything we do can be tallied up on a scorecard as either an accomplishment or a failure. The in between, it seems to me, is where we likely live most (or at least much) of our lives. And, let’s not discard or disregard or disrespect that now, shall we?

I’ll attempt to get specific: Last weekend my wife, Gloria, and I spent a couple of hours with our accountant. We were completing our corporate and personal tax returns with him. We neither experienced any great accomplishment nor a great failure. We got the taxes done. Just today, we had a man over from Andersen Windows. We’d replaced about half of our windows nearly two years ago and now it seemed the right time to replace the rest. No great accomplishments or failures here, either. However, in each interaction, both last week with our accountant and earlier today with Frank (the window man), we got the job done. We made progress. So, maybe I was wrong earlier; maybe these do represent great accomplishments. And if so, all the better!

Either way, if we really examine the “multitude of things that fall between the two” we might realize that many of them are accomplishments (great or minor) indeed. Successful communication between human beings is, in my book, always an accomplishment. No one getting (or feeling) hurt or cheated or used is an accomplishment in my book. A nice, simple home-cooked meal can sometimes feel like an accomplishment, it seems to me.

And failure? I think we are too quick to attach that label to an endeavor. I think it takes (often) a good deal of time to determine whether or not a particular overture or impulse or attempt is a failure. And I also think that failure is part of life. Tires fail, light bulbs fail, computer programs fail, and, sometimes, we fail to do what we said we would do or fail to be who we’ve set out to be. It happens. We also have (until we die) another day to live and try to do better. But our failures – however we might define that term – do not define us any more than our successes do. We are who we are. We need to go to sleep with that and wake up with that. It is.

Namaste.