I’ve been thinking a lot about failure the last few weeks.

No, I didn’t miss a penalty shot at a big match, wasn’t fired, or dumped.

And actually, I dispute these should even be thought of AS failures.

Originally that line was a mere aside but while writing this I stumbled into two things which have generated this full-blown paragraph digression. One, I saw Broadway musical Maybe Happy Ending, which asks, over a completely charming two hour story, not only what it means to be human (per the promotional material) but whether something must end in unadulterated happiness to be good. Making the point more succinctly, Elizabeth Oldfield’s reflection on the chapter in Pride in Fully Alive describes being part of a church that splintered, a painful ending—but “I regret no part of our time at that church … ,” citing Jack Gilbert’s poem Icharus, “just because something ended doesn’t mean it failed.”

Just because something ends, or because the ending did not turn out as intended doesn’t mean it failed. Something in me leaps up to fist-bump her across the page. YES! But what else would you call ‘non-success’? What’s the Thomas Edison quote we learn as school children? “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways to make a lightbulb that won’t work.” But English seems to lacks the nuance to convey other ways of conceiving of ‘non-success’ besides ‘failure,’ not necessarily the volume of words but the range:

[there’s meant to be an image here but my back-end site is wigging out; in the mean time, I offer you this experiment: go to thesaurus.com and type in “failure.”]

What can we call an outcome that doesn’t turn out the way we’d hoped but failure? If we don’t have an alternate word, perhaps we need to reconsider the word we have.

Some of my own recent failures: I tried to organize a gathering to which I was the only attendee, struck out trying to invite a friend to join us for homemade pizza. Editing portions of my work in progress, I recalled eagerly planted blueberry bushes which net, in a decade, have yielded about 5 berries. Not annually, but total. I completely butchered a piece of music as a sightread it at the piano normally used for kids’ practices. I lost superhost status on Airbnb—that one really hurt. I just fell down a couple stairs while taking dirty laundry from our third floor bedroom to our basement washer. That still hurts.

(But while I failed in remaining upright, I succeeded in generating immense sympathy from my children, who do not otherwise take much interest in the proper location for dirty laundry).

What does all this have in common? Small failure (“non-success?”) in an outward-facing goal in a very small arena, a safe place to try, to not-succeed, to practice the muscle of learning to fail.

A muscle I am increasingly convinced is critical to take do anything meaningful. As any adult watching a kid learn to walk well knows, you are basically guaranteed to fail at pretty much anything worth doing before you don’t fail. Listening to Ezra Klein on my morning run as he opines on the breakneck pace of AI innovations: “I just don’t know of many situations where human beings do something new at high speed and do it really, really well and perfectly the first set of times.” In more pedestrian terms, my kids moan, at the frontier of whatever is currently new, multiplying three digit numbers or tackling a new piano piece, “I’m bad at it.”

“You’re inexperienced,” I invariably retort.

But while Edison and I may have our pithy ways of writing off incremental failure on the way to not-failing, the reality is: it hurts! More than the scrape from my stair fiasco. How do you learn to tolerate the pain?

[another missing image: imagine me with a wry smile and beat up arm]

Unfortunately, I think it’s largely practice: you fail more. (See, e.g., Rejection Proof, a memoir-esque self help book about purposefully encountering rejection to ultimately become more successful). Fail in safe places, like play. With safe people, like a family who come rushing to your aid when you’re sitting on your bum at the bottom of the stairs. And since I mentioned AI above, perhaps I should hasten to add, in safe sandboxes, where your stake in the matter is approximately, proportionately tied to who bears the costs. We remember his hubris, but at least Icharus didn’t create a wax-winged passenger flight.

And this too: like Edison, Oldfield, and this mom, you reframe the measure of success. Beyond simply chasing a final, eventual Happy Ending, acknowledge, as Oldfield and Maybe Happy Ending each do, the part before the fail, full of miracles a sour ending may tempt you to overlook or forego. Don’t forget, before Icharus fell, he flew! Feel free to avoid failure, but you also forfeit flight.

Some of us are lucky enough (ha!) to not have to go chasing places to practice failure; hard knocks and dumb bad luck may have already ensured we are ace students in that particular class. Others of us have negotiated a relatively cocooned little life and have to make the active choice to seek it outside our safe confines. Much of my adult life has been in this camp. But what looks initially like safety is often anxiety-marked avoidance, rarely joyful, delightful, life-giving.

I want more delight, more joy. I want to fly. So I’ve long & slowly been practicing finding ways to get better at failure.

One area I’ve been *privileged *(*ahem*) to practice ‘failure’ recently is article submissions. I’ve posted less on my blog lately, but not because I haven’t been writing. I have a handful of essays I’m proud of and looking for a home for to share more widely. It is not going well. If, that is, “well” means they are published. Last year I published a handful of articles, a few in recognizable publications. This year I only have one credit to date. But wait! I have written, edited, honed, re-written a lot more. I have a longer list of “not the right fit at this time,” plus a few very kind and lovely rejection letters, comments from editors about how the writing spoke to them, great piece, etc.—just not our focus right now. (Alas, if only I wrote political journalism!) I might even be a little more brave. Have I failed?

I have a half dozen pieces in submission purgatory, including the one I described in my last newsletter. I shared how the passing of writing mentor Annie Dillard (in the “her reading spoke deeply to me and influenced how I see the world” sense, not the “she was a personal friend,” sense, alas) prompted me to fine-tune a piece inspired by her, to do a round of submissions. Response to date: (1) not taking submissions rn (2) pass (4) nothing yet. Have I failed? Do I have sufficient data to determine? For now, I wait.

As what point do I call it, just plop an essay on Tangible for your enjoyment instead of waiting for an external source to validate? (If you’re a writer, I’d love your thoughts!) There’s probably a time for that. But not yet. If learning to fail is a muscle, I’m still lifting baby weights. Plenty of room for further progressive overload before I max out.

It feels important to add one final note about how we grow in our capacity to tolerate the pain of failure en route to some good we can only meet on failure’s far coast: the mere hope of eventual success in the specific goal is a rather limited guiding light. There’s so much about most meaningful things we try for that is outside of our control. We are not guaranteed for “things to work out,” whether it’s my writing aspirations, finding a partner, or just getting a good haul of tomatoes from this year’s garden. And even if we get our way, who is to say that success will bring the abundant life we hope for?

I’ll close by contrast two very different voices: In the Ezra Klein podcast I referenced above, the guest, a computer science professor who spoke more brilliantly than I could fully compute, was giving heavy Pangloss, insisting on humanity’s ability to handle AI. At several points, Klein reminded him about the dire capacity of political institutions to tackle complex problems and relatively standard human prioritization of personal gain over the common good. I want to believe it will be OK, but do you not realize humanity’s capacity for greedy destruction?!

But what if we need not fear failure not because we’ll eventually succeed, nail it on the 10,001th try, but because even our failure cannot undo something fundamentally secure. What is that thing? As a Christian, it’s an easy-ish answer, if not always to live into, at least to know and understand. “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well,” says Julian of Norwich, from what she believed would be her deathbed, hitting an altogether different register. This isn’t the assurance of one who believes she’s going to live her best life, but who believes the God who has conquered death is with her in all of it. For her, and for me, that is ultimately what makes it safe to fail.