On Failure
Confronting our Shortcomings
Jesus said, "The man old in days will not hesitate to ask a small child seven days old about the place of life, and he will live. For many who are first will become last, and they will become one and the same."
-Gospel of Thomas, Saying 4
I didn’t know anyone still played marbles, but a few weeks back my daughter came home from school in a Marble Championship shirt telling me that she’d won her class competition. She handed me a letter from the county saying that she was to report to the Allegheny County Courthouse for the county tournament to see who would win and represent the region in some national marble competition in New Jersey. The whole thing sounded like a hoax meant to ensnare me into paying delinquent parking tickets at the courthouse, but after a quick inventory of my unpaid debts (and some Google searches) it all checked out.
The first day went by much better than expected. Like many children under 10, my daughter has a tendency to spend a lot of time talking about how much she likes doing things and very little time practicing doing them. Thus, I spent the preceding week or two hearing her talk about how much she needed to practice her marbles but never doing so, even when reminded. I’ve already vowed not to become a “sports dad” who forces her into things she doesn’t like just to instill discipline, so that’s where we left it. At some point, she’s going to have to learn on her own that failure to prepare will result in failure, and I fear that forcing her into things may develop good habits at the expense of negative self-esteem.
To my surprise, the first day made it seem as though she may not learn much of a lesson. She destroyed the competition. I expected her to learn the error of a lack of preparation, but instead the marbles decided to bounce the right way. Any expectation I had of trying to support her through a difficult emotional moment faded, replaced by primal euphoria at watching my kin experience joy.
We left the placement round with a renewed fervor for marbles. Now, when my daughter said she hoped she would qualify for the championship, instead of cringing at anticipated disappointment I was reinforcing that feeling for her. My usual aw shucks I dunno we’ll see tone had given way to excitement on her behalf. Now that I’d seen her in action, I was starting to believe luck or some innate marble talent was on her side.
Then came the semifinals on day two. My daughter shot the marbles the same way as the day before but didn’t manage to win a game. The lucky bounces that propelled her to the front of the pack the day before had disappeared. The gods were not kind to her.
It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to watch in my life, even as she kept her head screwed on straight.
We all delight at the pain of others, even if that pain is relative. There are extreme examples of this, but I don’t mean masochistic enjoyment of pain. I’m talking more about the natural enjoyment that comes from victory, or achievement, which normally happens at someone else’s expense. Even if one is not especially competitive, it’s rare to find someone who genuinely doesn’t consider themselves to have a “rooting interest” in something, whether it be hobbyism or religion or politics or sports or elsewhere.
I’ve found that one of the unexpected side effects of loving my children is that I no longer like when anyone competes at all. I don’t mean this in the universal sense (I’m still watching the NBA playoffs), but I find myself pondering the thin line between ambition and competition; spiritual fulfillment and pettiness.
My daughter handled failure so much better than I did at her age. The bystanders likely didn’t know she was experiencing much pain because they don’t spend every waking moment agonizing over her existence. What tells there are that something might be wrong. The people around may not have noticed, but I didn’t see the gleeful shuffle of her feet when she can’t wait for her next turn. I didn’t see the giggles to herself at a joke she’d just thought of. I didn’t see her eyes find mine and smile once. I don’t know how to describe the sensation; quicksand that had been heated to a boil, perhaps, as I restrained my urge to lurch forward and console her, knowing my weakness could undermine her own strength.
I’ve always associated failure with losing because I grew up playing sports, never aware of just how unhealthy that outlook can be. Processing your success through wins and losses creates a zero sum psyche. Zero sum thinking is probably the easiest and most natural way to exist because it’s what we see all around us. Wins and losses. Life and death. Fulfillment and banality.
But just as parenting has turned me off of competition, it’s also showed me how inevitable it is. I’m sure there are healthy ways of channeling it. I’m not sure I’ve found one yet. Maybe that’s why everything sucks so bad here.
The service of parenthood is antithetical to the idea of a zero sum existence. Rather than shepherding my children down my path and hoping they have greater success than I did — a form of parenting that invokes simulation staging and seems truly torturous — I’d rather escort them along a path of spiritual fulfillment. They will find things to be competitive about through the natural course of their ambitions, which I will model for them by pursuing my own. The things that they aspire to will change with time and I would rather they learn how to feel a sense of driven satisfaction with accomplishment than make them feel as though nothing is ever enough.
I will fail them. They will fail themselves. Failure is an inevitability and an opportunity for growth because it brings us closer to the truth of our human limitations. It seems to me that this is also why we hate it so much, even before we’ve learned the concept of winning and losing, or have the capacity to understand incentive structures beyond pain avoidance. Nobody likes being reminded they can’t do something, even when they already intrinsically know it.
The day after the great marble catastrophe, my daughter went on an outing with her grandfather. It was a coincidence that it was the day after after a deeply humbling experience, as they’d been planning the outing for weeks. When they stopped at the toy store my father promised her, my daughter picked up a set of marbles of her own volition. “Now I can practice, because I want to try again next year,” she told me when she got home.