On Laurels

We don't learn very much from our mistakes. It's only the wisest of us who actually dwells in their own errors without being consumed by them and without losing focus of the lesson held inside.

Most of us avoid our errors at all costs. It's much easier to walk through life with the sunshine of our achievements beaming down on our shoulders. The problem with that sunshine to our backs is that it does little to illuminate the way ahead. It provides us with a lot of warmth, though, and that's much easier to live in than the cold shadow of our own inequity.

But triumphs don't teach us anything. At their most basic, they are actually successful exhibitions of what we already know. The difficulty of a test is directly proportionate to the amount of information we don't know. Some tests allow us to use prior knowledge to deduce the solution - others are simple tests of whether we know the correct response or not. None of us ever scores perfectly, though. Not in any meaningful way.

A friend of mine from high school named Eli almost threw himself a party when he broke the 1500 mark on the SATs. He was beaming, and rightfully so. It was a major accomplishment and he worked hard for it. He ended up going to a state school instead of the Ivy league for whatever reason (the graduating class before me sent top students to Yale, Harvard, Princeton, UPenn, while my class sent top students to ATM, UT, and Tech. I'll never understand it), so it's been easy for me to keep in touch with him.

Eli and I spent some time together in Corpus right at the tail end of college - the usual sort of get-together for people entering the 16th grade. There was some alcohol, a random old friend strumming aimlessly on a guitar somewhere and the string of conversation that flowed around the room like the smoke from our cigarettes. And somehow, John managed to steer the conversation toward the SATs and his triumphant score. We'd talked a lot about what we'd done in college - I was about to start my term as student body VP, another friend was rounding out his med school applications and crossing his fingers, but Eli hadn't really done much of anything.

He'd been resting on the laurels of his past. If I had had the foresight then, I would have asked him what he'd failed at over the years we'd been apart. I'm guessing, now, that the answer would have been nothing. I'm sure he sailed through most of his classes, and it seemed like he just hadn't tried anything to fail at. And he still wanted to talk about those SATs.

Achievements can become a ball and chain. They can weigh us down more than help us. The sound of applause and the feel of a pat on the back do little to further who we are as people. On the flip side, though, failure only works as a teacher if we're a willing student.

If we dwell in our failure - truly mire ourselves into the horror of imperfection, we can lose sight of the lesson. If we avoid the memory of our failure, we will never have that sight to begin with.

What's the last triumph you had? How long ago was it? Are you still resting on its laurels? Are you still tied down by it?

Dare to fail. Life will become a lot more clear when you do.