I NO LONGER FEEL LIKE A FAILURE.

I NO LONGER FEEL LIKE A FAILURE

In an interview I saw earlier today, Australian author Tim Winton said “When I was growing up, I never met anyone like me.” I felt an immediate connection with that.

But I wasn’t always happy about it.

I desperately wanted to belong – to be accepted by everyone else. So, as Colin Hayes often said, I sold out and went-along to get along. It didn’t work; I still  made an easy target for bullies, and I did my own share of bullying when I found someone even less able to defend himself. I grew up not liking myself much.

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As with a lot of people of my era, I was brought up to “make something of my life.” Among the many admonitions from my parents I had drilled into me “Finish what you start.” Unfortunately that was at odds with an unacknowledged personal inclination that went something like “If at first you don’t succeed, don’t be an idiot. Try another way – try something different.” Holding those two principles in one space has proved to be one helluva challenge.

By the early 1980’s a very busy life that had involved aggressively pursuing several careers began to seriously unravel, culminating in the shock departure of my wife of 18 years, and subsequent divorce. I hadn’t seen that coming. The bottom fell out of my world. After that, there’s nothing much new you can tell me about hell. I felt life had just sucked me backwards through a sewer, and I was drowning in it.

What had I done wrong? Had I missed something? If so, what? And why hadn’t somebody warned me?

A few years before, aware that since branching out of theatre and TV into more commercial pursuits I’d lost some direction, I decided it was time to stop surfing the waves of fortune that had borne me so far, and take some deliberate control of life. I jumped headfirst into the personal development movement, lapping up breakfasts and seminars led by success gurus, and learning techniques for disciplining my wayward mind. I gobbled down and practised techniques for winning friends and influencing people. I set daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, 5- and 10-yearly goals. I affirmed myself silly. The whole mind-gymnasium….

At first, it seemed to work – things got better, except sometimes. As months turned into years, though, I realised it wasn’t working, except occasionally. Because I couldn’t find what I was doing wrong I concluded I was missing something. There was something else – a “secret ingredient X”. I had not yet learned there’s a difference between control (not possible), and Mastery (the purpose of it all).

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Like most people of the time, I was viewing my life as a series of mostly continuous time lines, each with its own identifiable beginning, and directed towards an end that meant achieving a consciously imagined goal – an attainment that I could call “Success”. 

As a pianist and organist I aimed to make magnificent, stirring music, play  grand organs, with choirs and orchestras. As an actor I wanted to get to know the parts in me and create revelatory moments of experience for an audience. I also later wanted to be recognised, rich and famous. As a director I wanted to inspire. As a business man I wanted to create success, for others and, ergo, myself. As a father I wanted to support, inspire and create children who would be self-reliant, self responsible, and … happy. As a writer and radio presenter I wanted to inform, inspire and empower.

Each of those line-journeys was all about attaining that “Success”. Anything that fell short of success was, by definition, Failure. Thanks to some of the 70’s rah-rah-rah training, I wasn’t too fearful of failure – God knows I had experienced it often enough and lived to fight another day! I chose to regard failures as learning-stones to Success.

But…. when I moved to Thailand I looked back along my timelines and saw that, in none of these endeavours along the line, had I finished what I started. Each had come to an end, un-completed, with goals un-attained. I felt a failure. I stopped writing my life story – it seemed pointless. Although I could see and feel how I was becoming wiser and more effective, and changing my life styles and habits was propelling me to evolve as a human being, I was still quietly carrying this failure-feeling in my back pocket for more than a decade longer.

Then came a changing moment, so small and yet so deep that it resonates still, every day…….

I travelled to Maidenhead earlier this year to intervene in my son’s life at a time when his world, like mine years before, had come crashing down. Having learned so much from the aftermath of losing my marriage and the journey that disaster had launched me onto, I had acquired knowing and understandings of real value to offer the lad, ready and waiting on the backburner for years for the appropriate time to put them to him.

This was the time.

I was walking through a local garden on the Thames riverbank when the thought struck – “My whole life has led to this moment.” It was a goosebumps revelation. My pulse quickened with a sense of immediacy (not to be confused with urgency) Then, soon after – “Yes, but now the past no longer matters. The power is Now. And this moment here/now is complete in itself. There’s no failure here; no success. Starting from this quiet Here, all there is, is Possibility. And whatever I decide now to do next.”

I sat watching the river, with its traffic of work barges, pleasure yachts, cruise launches and white swans. Looking much, much closer at any lines with the aid of a magnifying glass, they lose their solidity and appear as a series of dashes and dots, with space in between them. And in those spaces in my timeline I heard Your life has been a series of dots, each complete in itself. Each perfect. No failures. Look at it. Life is also a dance of dot-moments of “A-hah!

The spaces opened up.

Memories fell into those bits of nothing, memories of fabulously full and complete instances when I had momentarily experienced what I’d longed for. I recalled the freedom of dancing down the steps of the Perth Concert Hall like Gene Kelly, the repleteness of standing in the empty studio after the hugely successful opening night of Channel 4 in Albury, the ethereal wonder of waking up at 3am to a moondrenched view over Paris, the moment I first held my newborn son, the awe of watching him chillingly burn the house down as an actor in “The Browning Version”, the sheer pride of watching my daughter stage manage a concert I’d produced, the connectedness with choirs I’d conducted, and the sense of power playing the awesome organ at the Sydney Town Hall, celebrating life-changing moments with my daughter in Inward Adventure, shopping and coffee in Windsor, as my youngest granddaughter opened bits of her life to the light, walking my youngest grandson to and from school, listening to another wise old man in a young boy’s body …. (memories of his Dad)

I got it. I had failed many times along the way, but I wasn’t A Failure.

So much evidence I’d let slip by un-noticed.

And in this moment…… nothing…. Just suchness.

Why had I hung onto this feeling “I’m a failure”? What was the payoff supposed to be? An answer wasn’t long in coming – to goad myself to succeed. I was using a prospect of failure to get success.

Insane!

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Changing my view of seeing a life story as a series of complete moments of “now”, instead of an uncompleted historical line en-route to some distant Awards Night, has had a big effect on me since.

I started walking a few months ago to "get into training" for a cruise I’m booked on next year. Unfit as I was and ageing as I am, the walking was hard and painful work (huff-puff). "If the cruise doesn’t happen, this will be all for nothing" thought me. Then one day I decided to take along a camera I’d recently bought  -- to get acquainted with it, ready for cruise next year (another goal). Having the camera around my neck prompted me to notice minor miracles of life along the way each day and capture an image of the moment. Something happened. I got interested in the process of walking itself, as well as its objectives. I downloaded the images, played around with them in a photoshopping programme, then started to share some of my moments of “now” on Facebook. The daily walks developed a parallel purpose of their own. Walking became less suffering and more "Wow, look at that!" I realised a change this week -- If I don't get to go on the cruise, this won't have been "all for nothing" I’m already feeling better.

The difference between the dynamics of Linear and Dot approaches to life can be more simply explained if I use the example of travelling from here to London. If I were doing this linearly I could fly there direct; and come home again. Job done. There is an aspect of living linearly that allows us to postpone experience (“job done”) to a future time. 

But this time I want an experience in which arriving at my destination (London) is a possible bonus, while the real juice is inherent in all the rich moments of the journey itself – and I won’t know what a lot of those are likely to be until I’m actually in them. That’s my idea of surfing an Adventure!

Of course, I get to sleep in the same cabin most nights, and a lot of pre-planning is going into the trip, but because I’m navigating new territory on the internet, with embassies and health providers, even this is a challenging adventure in itself.

The map is not the journey, any more than a restaurant menu is the meal.

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Experience has taught me –

·       A Linear (Kinetic) life is always incomplete until the goal is reached. Then there’s a lot of doubt about whether the attainment of the goal brings the desired satisfaction anyway, but that’s a discussion for another time.

·       A Dot (Energerial) life is complete in every moment you’re aware of. Each now-experience itself is a “goal-attained”.

While I was walking in order to make the most out of a future event, I was thinking linearly. But once I made each walk a complete event in itself, I began walking energerially. Each walk is a series of now-wows, and here/now is the ONLY place we can be alive. It’s our choice whether to fill now with Wows, or with bits of a dead past or scraps of a future nightmare. All there ever is, though, is Now. 

Are you living en route to somewhere/sometime else, or here and now?

It’s your choice. Always.

I think it was Socrates who said, “Without a purpose, life has no meaning.”. At the other extreme, Sartre and Adler both said, “Don’t stress yourself, life is meaningless.” By holding these two opposites side-by-side in my heart, I get “Here now just IS – any meaning is the meaning that you give it” Your life just IS; its meaning is up to you. And whatever you decide this moment means to you, you get to be right about it, opportunities come to your door for you to explore and express that meaning, and you get to experience the results of your choices.

In your life, you get to be god, just as I do in mine

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You give your meaning to your life; I give my meaning to mine.

We experiment – just to see how it turns out.

And then we can get together over a drink and compare notes.

Some of my experiments have turned out to be other than I expected – well most of them, actually. But somewhere along the line I realised in that moment in that garden by the Thames, that in all the things I had set out to achieve – I had my moments! Wow! And now I was slap bang in the middle of more moments where, sooner or later, I’d get what I wanted, or something better than I could imagine (there have been LOTS of those!)

And I’m still here and a smorgasbord of moments awaits. All that is required of me is to be present and available to as many of them as possible. To give them meaning that is meaningful to me, I look for opportunities to connect and share them with others. 

But that’s just me.

The bottom line of it all is interpersonal connection – Love -- and our challenge is to summon the courage to drop our defences and ideas of separation, and be that vulnerable.

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It was about this time that I noticed that the pall of “failure” had lifted. From my soul.

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Now, the only Love I can be certain of is mine. It took a long time to get confident in my own love and trusting enough to be my own guiding star, but – hey – better late than never.

Love. This is enough.

Looking to be recognised in return is a treadmill going nowhere. Just love, for its own sake opens the vaults of joy and happiness.

If someone or something else decides to love me back….

That's a bonus.

That’s a bonus.