To Fail is Simply To Succeed Undesirably

You may have heard it before. An inspirational quote that you brush aside as idealistic and corny.

"There is no such thing as a failure. If you fail to do something one way, you succeed in doing it another way."

Now the word failure is kind of curious in the same way that the number zero is curious. They both describe states of non-being. Any mathematician knows that zero is a concept, like infinity, and that it can reasoned with but not explicitly observed. The problem with the word failure is that it is entirely dependent upon its antonym: success.

Success, in verb form, is defined as "achieving a desired outcome". So then we could reasonably say that the opposite of success would be simply the negation: "not achieving a desired outcome."

But you can't really not-achieve something, can you? You can't have zero apples. You can describe your condition as "a state of not possessing apples" but you can't actually have no apples. In other words, you can "not have apples" but you cannot "have no apples."

(These funny little distinctions occur in many situations where you have a negation that depends an occurrence not occurring. Like right and wrong, for example. Something is only right if it is not wrong, and vice versa.)

One literally cannot fail. Instead, we successfully do something that is not desired. Every living moment of our lives is spent doing something, even if that something is sleeping, watching TV, committing a crime, getting stage fright, oversleeping an alarm, etc.

Is it real to say that there is no such thing as failure, or is this simply another way to rearrange and redesign the syntax to reflect more light? In truth it is both, because reality is in the eye of the beholder. As humans we have lots of little ways to weave our perceptions into a unique web which is spun befittingly to our environment, culture, personal limitations, childhood, and just about every event that affects us.

So why is it important to make this distinction at all?

Because it neutralizes events to be on the same plane. When you realize that the dichotomy doesn't exist as you thought it did, you can more easily traverse from the realization of one event to the realization of another, more desirable one.

Of course I will relate this to music, since this is a music blog. Say that I am about to attempt to play a phrase of music. Lying before me, in the seconds that it will take to play the phrase, are literally an infinite number of paths which my life-events might take. A precious few are desired (namely, that I play the phrase and play it in a manner that I deem "successful"), and countless others are undesired (which include all the musical things that could go wrong, as well as a sudden coughing fit of varying lengths, my dog throwing up on my foot and distracting me, an asteroid hitting my house, and everything in between). Each path has a different probability of occurring in those moments, with some of the probabilities much larger than others and some infinitesimally small. They are, however, all instances of something succeeding in happening. It is important to understand that probability of something happening is 1, and it leaves no room for nothing to happen.

Every thing that happens in my day teaches me something. If it is desired I learn how to replicate the experience, and if it is undesired I also learn how to replicate the experience, although in future I might decide not to. Some people when reading this post might think that this concept is indeed true but just not really applicable to the way that we think and live our day-to-day lives. In my experience as both an unhappy and a happy person, I've learned that an unhappy person will tend to scorn the one who preaches kindness and positive thinking, believing that the optimist is jaded and undeserving of the fortune to feel peacefully.

The relaxation of pride and the strength to adapt unequivocally from your undesired successes is freedom of the spirit, and the freedom to weave the web of your life's events into the shape that you want.