The joy of failing

The joy of failing

It was a Friday evening and the long, post-dinner, walk from Milano’s on Dame Street to the Busáras Inter-city bus station had been full of laughs, and funny anecdotes. My friends from work, Bernice, Andy, Jane and I were celebrating birthdays amongst other little joys that life has to offer. A rather heavy, three-course meal later, the walk back to the north side of the city over Burg Quay was a welcome relief. Even though the night air was chill, and had forced us to button our parkas till our chin, no one was complaining. At the Busáras bus station, Jane asked me if I had heard back from a job, which we had all been hoping I would get. I replied in the affirmative, and her face brightened momentarily only to fall when she learnt that I had been unsuccessful in my application. The conversation thereafter, touched around the fringes of the failed attempt and laughing at life’s misfortunes. ‘It’s really not easy to undermine your positivity, isn’t it?’ she said moments before boarding the bus back home.

I thought about positivity, long and hard, after she had left, as I walked back towards the city centre. It would be wrong to say that I wasn’t fixated on the failure to land the job, which in many ways would have been ideal for me. Not that I am without one right now, but the idea of striving towards new highs has been ingrained into us since the inception of time and in some ways I share that same DNA. 

I was bummed also because, the news had come right at the end of the day, which meant a long, weekend of twisting and turning the loss in my head. I stopped to gaze at a familiar graffiti near the North Star Hotel. It brought a smile to my face and a happy memory when an old friend and I would walk down towards her house a little further up north in Ballybough.

My earliest memory of a somewhat public failure, was when I flunked the Engineering Graphics exam in my first year at an engineering school. I scored a measly 16 on 100 even after having attempted four questions in the paper. I locked myself up for two days in my room to avoid facing the world. But on the third day, when I decided to head back to school, I discovered nothing really had changed. The world moved on at its usual pace and had no time to mourn a failed exam. 

That very thought brought along with it an incredible lightness of being. So I had failed. So what? I had a chance to start afresh and write the exam again. I did, and a semester later scored an 80 on the same paper. 

Over the years, I have failed repeatedly. Sometimes at school, sometimes at work, sometimes with relationships and sometimes those who I have called my very own have failed me. There have been times when the failures have been public and humiliating, and there are times when I have found myself begging, crawling and clawing my way back to my sensibilities and every one of those moments have brought along with them wisdom and in retrospect something better. Failure, I have learnt, like cancer, has many names and faces and they are all there to teach something better.

My walk brought me to the Spire of Dublin, which I crossed to walk over onto Henry Street seeing late evening shoppers and early night party-goers scurry by. I thought of the failed job attempt once again. And then I thought of the 496 job rejection emails that read, ‘Unfortunately...,’, ‘We regret to inform you...’, ‘Your qualifications were good but...’ and I thought of the small successes that life had still bestowed upon me. I had a good family, friends who took care of me, the kindness of absolute strangers, a job that helped me sustain, my ability to write and so on and so forth. The chill of the night sky did less to dampen my spirits. My thoughts were broken when Jane texted me from the bus, ‘Today’s dinner was lovely. Thank you. Oh and don’t worry, something better will come along.’

There was no way I was going to be disappointed about rejection no 497.

(Rohan Swamy is a former journalist, writer, photographer, now working at Trinity College Dublin)

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