In Praise of Failures

I definitely do have my ups and my downs. I'm not bipolar but quite possibly bi-about-thirty-degrees-latitude. I can feel myself slipping into a slump; my mind's eye sees the world change its color scheme to blues and blacks and my mind's ear hears the background music go to a minor key. I can't stop it from happening --yet -- but knowing that it's perception rather than reality that is going dark on me helps me handle these infrequent dips in my optimism.

When I start to spiral down to the dumps, one place that's dangerous for me to visit is my shop. That's because my shop is also a museum: the resting place for a fairly amazing collection of, well, stuff. I have ideas in art, furniture, photography, boat design, electronics, toys, and several other fields I'm probably forgetting. Most of those ideas exist, in my museum, as actual pick-'em-up-and-look-at-'em things. Some are crude prototypes, some are finished production models. They are all dust-dated, some of the oldest sporting a full quarter inch of settlings, some of the new carrying barely a film.

When I'm wearing my glum glasses all that stuff gathering dust in my museum looks like reciepts for time wasted. The ideas didn't pan out, for one reason or the other. The designs were off, the wood wouldn't work the way I wanted, the outcome didn't match my vision, the world wasn't ready -- as many reasons as there are relics. When I'm in a funk, walking through that collection makes me feel like everything I've ever tried has failed. I contemplate renting a dumpster from the city and getting rid of the whole lot. I never do that because when I'm down I have no energy for creating or destroying.

My museum survives, by default, and is there for me when my spirits rise to where they belong. Then I walk among the exhibits and see something more than failure. I tried something, it didn't quite work out, but I learned something in the bargain. We may fail when we set our goals too high but do we really succeed when we set our goals too low? Like, "I bet I can stack this beer can on top of another" compared to "I think I'll carve an operating grand piano out of a single piece of wood".

I think I'll go carve myself a piano.