Future Shock

Not so very long ago famed author J.K. Rowling was asked to address recent college graduates. It was a moving talk. Having eagerly devoured her many Harry Potter books, the students were anxious to hear what advice this successful writer had to offer. What Rowling chose to speak about was failure. Rowling explained that her parents urged her early on to pursue a vocational degree. In having a trade, they believed their daughter would never experience the poverty they had endured. But she had other ideas. This is what the famous author had to say:

"What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be … without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. 
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me…I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had and old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale that I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default. Failure taught me things about myself I could have learned no other way."
Rowling’s advice is priceless. It cuts through humanity because the fear of not succeeding keeps the best of us stuck in our rocking chair.
During Sukkot there is a special prayer that we say during the Grace After Meals, "May the Merciful One (HaRachaman) restore the fallen Sukkah of David." Can God really repair the two-thousand-plus year old lean-to? No, say the great Sages of the Talmud. In that prayer we are asking God to restore to the people confidence. We want to be able to transform our painful past into a better future. In other words, the prayer wants us to build better "us" from the ashes of our failures. The pathway to wholeness happens when we overcome the internal hurdles that hold us back.
I am a professional bumper-sticker reader. One that struck me recently read, "What if you had no fear? What could you accomplish?" 
I mulled that question over in my mind for a very long time. What, indeed, could life offer if I was unafraid of failure? What mountains would come into reach? So many times, the fear of crashing keeps us from trying new things, having new experiences, finding our hidden strengths.
There is a novel web-site that has visitors writing letters to themselves in the future. Called FutureMe.org, people from all over the world write letters to themselves. The messages invariably contain a single element that remains a constant: the writers hope they can get over their pain. 
The creator of FutureMe.org sees this site as an attempt "at forward narrative, a poignant, maybe desperate, assertion of personal continuity over time. … More deeply, such a message implicitly accepts a duty to future generations. … Future me may reject present me’s choices, but my message … is, in its way, an attempt to acknowledge responsibility rather than evade it. Globe and Mail, April 28/07
People are deeply concerned that they will not survive the pain they are living through now. Here is one entry dated October 27, 2005, Dear FutureMe, How are you now? you happy? did you find your "next big thing"? work ok? did dad survive the transplant? 

Unlike the usual conventional wisdom, "failure is an option" is closer to the truth than it not being an option. In fact, failure is how we learn. The greatest challenge for us to be unafraid of non-success. Think of what is possible, as the bumper sticker read, if we allow ourselves to fully test the limits of our abilities. And if we fail? We have learned our limitations and will have grown in the process. And towering above us is the Lord God who urges us to test the limitations of what is possible and grow to become what He has envisioned for us.

Boo-Boos

We are prone to making boo-boos.  Not the kind where you scrape your knee or hit your head getting out the car too fast but the other kind.  Boo-boos are good.  They mean we are experimenting, taking a chance, stepping beyond our usual habits.  

Take jokes, for example.  Some people seem to naturally funny and others, well, not so much.  Yet we all like to laugh and make other experience the joy of a good chuckle. When they fall flat, do not give up, try telling the joke again until you get it right.

There are many wondrous and difficult aspects to being a child.  One the other former is that we are game for about anything, jumping off a high limb, rolling in the mud, tasting dog biscuits and eating asparagus (that does no usually end up so good).

It is a sad day when we grow up and admit, “We can’t do it.”  And worse, we do not even try.

Y. Peretz, crafter of Hebrew stories wrote, “Nobody trips over a mountain; you trip over a pebble.”  When we fail it is hardly ever disastrous.  Failure is a signal that we need to modify what we did, not stop trying.

On June 2, 2010, Armando Galarraga, 28 pitched what seemed to be a perfect game, a feat only achieved twenty times in Major League Baseball's 130 year history. However, on the very last play of the game, umpire Jim Joyce, 65, mistakenly called the runner safe at first base, ruining the perfect game. After the game, understanding the mistake he had made and the implications to Galarraga, with tears in his eyes, Joyce went over to Galarraga and apologized, admitting his mistake. Galarraga graciously accepted his apology saying, "nobody's perfect. Everybody's human. " They then wrote a book together titled "Nobody's Perfect."

The thing is the pitcher did not retire or give up.  He continued on, having learned an unintended lesson of life.

Mistakes should always be purposeful, never meaningless.  Yogi Berra once commented, “I don’t want to make the wrong mistake.”  He was right, in his inimitable way.  There are some mistakes that are bad choices but even then we learn and grow.

Talmud, which is the judicial and philosophical backbone of our people, is full of trial, error and then more trial.  “Arguments for the sake of truth,” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks labeled it.

The Mei Shiloach, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef of Ishbitz, wrote, “A person can only uphold the teachings of the Torah when he has stumbled in them.”  The sage is telling us, “Go ahead, take a chance, a risk, make mistakes, learn from them, change, and grow.

It’s a New Year.  We are  year older and G-d willing, a year wiser.  Even Torah has Moss and David doing some real bloopers.  Yet their greatness is that they become great through their errors.

Give it your best shot.  Then give it your better shot.