Aesthetic Snafu

Fail better.  That’s the undercurrent in our society.  It’s okay to fail if you succeed.  We love the story of the under dog; the one who failed, worked hard, and then succeeded.  It’s a narrative that fits into our bootstrapping, feisty vision of ourselves.  But what if you fail and fail again, and again, and again?  What then?

I’m having a hard time with failure myself.  There have been a couple of set-backs in my health and I feel like I’m back where I started, weeks or years later.  I’m not failing better, I’m just, well, failing.  I want to hope that this is temporary, that I’ll go back to succeeding or at least failing better, but it’s hard to see right now.  Trying to remind myself that my 90 seconds of jogging yesterday was easier than on Tuesday doesn’t go so far when I remember how a month ago 3 minutes of jogging was just as easy.

How do you stay optimistic when you seem to be making negative progress?

At least the heat has been great for our plants if not for us.  We’ve gotten 3 cucumbers already from our pots, and our basil is huge.

Plus less guilt about hiding out inside watching Wimbledon and eating ice cream.

That said, I’m counting the hours until we fly to Portland.

That feeling, when you’re finally, finally getting to the end of a pile of work; the type of pile of work that you kept seeing the end of, until! until! something would happen and it would pile some more, your date of freedom pushed even further back.  That feeling is brilliant!  Knowing that you are nearly done, that no more surprise bits and pieces can sneak themselves is so freeing.

I have been chewing on my own, metaphorical stack, although I have had jobs where the stack was physical, this one, luckily, is under enough of my control that it’s not.  I got double-booked and then some favors added on and I’ve been running to catch up.  This weekend though, this beautiful weekend, was nearly all of it even though I took a break for a caber toss or two.

Can we talk about how amazing the caber toss is? A sport consisting of throwing something amazingly heavy and unwealdly judged not by amount of weight or farthest thrown but rather how daintily and accurately thrown.  Plus one where you can pay only $12 to see the world champion compete and lose happily to a novice while also getting some dogs to pet and excellent shortbread for your time.

The pile, yes the pile.  It’s nearly done, a map to draw, handful of pages of editing left, and then I’ll be uneumbered with nothing on the horizon as if I was a fifth grader sitting through those last hot days before summer vacation.  If I were a real adult about it, I should be worried about where the next paycheck is coming from, if there’s anyway to get my clients to space themselves out a little bit; instead I’m imagining a big cup of lemonade, the shady bit of grass under a tree in the evening when it’s not so hot, and a good trashy novel with vampires or werewolves or witches in it.

There are some things that once you do them you wonder why you didn’t do it earlier.  Clean mopped floors, freshly changed sheets, newly cut hair, posting a new blog entry.  I always change my sheets, but the floors, haircut, and blog, well not so much.

That is to say, I haven’t been writing.  Well I have been writing, on the backs of fielding forms, little post-its, empty spaces in the newspaper, but not posting.  Not finishing, not polishing, not sharing. Not feeling confident about the value of what I had to share, even though it’s my story and just as valid as any other story.  Even though my job is to hear stories, everyone’s stories, anyone’s stories, about the most mundane things – face wash, planting, soup – and to show the value and nuance in them.