I have been trying, without much success, to create an entry for my blog all week. I can’t say that external things have prevented me – it’s not as though I have been assailed from every side by sudden crises, or any particular increase in my, very small, responsibilities. The fact is, I have failed to do it due mainly to my own fault.

I could blame external circumstances, and I have been reasonably busy this week, but not significantly more so than usual.

I could blame the intimidating title of my blog here – Be Informed is a big thing to carry. There are a lot of things to be informed about, and I am pursuing understanding in a number of different areas, and it is certainly true that I can’t produce two really thorough articles every week, while simultaneously working 4 days a week (what a hardship I hear you cry!), writing my novel, which is what I’m supposed to be doing on Fridays and Saturdays, doing research for stuff I’m supposed to be doing for church, working through my reading list… etc etc etc.

But still. I knew about all these things when I agreed to do this. What is needed is more self discipline, and the habit of work. And perhaps to be a little less precious about the quality of my entries. It is early days after all. Perhaps I could write smaller articles, or just do what a lot of other people do, and post links.

All these things are good points, good ideas. But they miss the heart of what I’m feeling at the moment, which is failure.

Failure is an interest of mine. Ever since I arrived in Melbourne right at the time when the IT market was in its post boom contraction, and was thus thrown from well paid, if stressful, work into unemployment (just as stressful, but without the healing balm of money), followed by my wife and my realisation that this whole getting pregnant thing might be a bit more of a challenge than we had bargained for, I have had to wrestle with actual failure for the first time in my life.

Sure, I had had my low level failures – didn’t get as good a degree as I could have done (if I hadn’t been so busy doing other things at the time), and come to think of it, my final year marks at school weren’t what they could have been either (but then, I didn’t exactly over-exert myself with study.) But all of these failures were easily shrugged off. Excuses were made (not least by me), and, besides – they weren’t things I was really all that invested in anyway.

This suggests at least one broad division in my schema of failure: failure when it matters, really matters, versus failure when it doesn’t really.

A lot of failure is recoverable from reasonably easily, or at least straight-forwardly. You got bad marks in your final high school marks? Go back and do them again. You got a bad degree? Well, you can always do another course, and do try to focus this time, and stop spending your time faffing around with uni societies and drinking gallons of coffee in the student union.

(Not that I want to downplay how important this sort of failure is to people – I know that bad school marks can be a catastrophe for people, and glib suggestions that you go back to school or uni and try again are worse than useless if you’re too poor to spend another few years without earning. I’m speaking purely of my own experience here.)

The thing I’m trying to get at here is that some failures can be fairly easily recovered from. They can even be salutary: when my marathon time was a disappointing 5:12, I learned a few things about myself – my tendency to leave everything to the last minute (leading to overtraining injuries, hence the poor time), my tendency to agree to things in a moment of enthusiasm, my laziness (all of which are somehow coming back to me as I write). I can learn from my mistakes, go back and try again.

There are, on the other hand, more depressing failures. Failures where the cheery “it’s just a way to fine tune your approach” is deeply unhelpful. Not that it is necessarily factually wrong – my interview approach during my year of unemployment probably could have used a little fine tuning, and perhaps I should have considered other ways to earn a living. But when you’re caught in the slough of it, so deep in despondency that even getting out of bed in the morning seems like too much effort, and the sight of happy laughing people (or so it seems to you) on their way to work makes you want to shout and cry at the same time, being told to cheer up, look at concrete ways to do something about it is strangely unhelpful. Even though it is pretty good advice, in the abstract.

Failures, in short, mark you. They make you feel cut off from the common run of people laughing with friends in the pub. Even though you know that they aren’t as happy as they seem on the surface, that everyone carries a wound about inside them. But the wound is on the inside, where it can’t be seen, and so you resent them, with a bitterness which surprises you, especially if you’re supposed to be some sort of Christian and be loving and what-not.
In short, failure, serious, life changing failure – the sort of failure where you feel simultaneously to blame and also completely powerless, is a pretty bad trip, where the advice that you know intellectually is probably correct can’t penetrate through the layers of pain.

On top of this, our society isn’t very interested in failure, except as the back story to some rags-to-riches uplift. We don’t value it, don’t feel that it has any insights to offer us. We feel that it doesn’t offer solutions, and it is solutions that we are interested in, as a society.

There is, I think, another side to failure. It is by its nature painful, and what rational person wants to experience pain, no matter what positive “learnings” you get out of it? Perhaps there is more to it than that. I will explore this in future blogs, but for the moment I will leave you with two questions.

Are you familiar with the term “The Dark Night of the Soul”?
What what does Christianity have to say about the whole topic?