Failure

When I want to write, but I do not know what I want to write about, I just start writing.  Even if it is complete gibberish, meaningless or a plethora of clichés mixed with stock sentences the point isn't what I am writing but the fact that I write something, anything.

I do this, because if you try to think of what to write and never put anything down in the hope that the perfect idea will come to you, then at the end of the day what you will most likely end up with is a blank page.  This extends beyond writing though, into every part of our lives.  If you do nothing for want of waiting to know what you want to do then you'll end up doing what you are doing - nothing.  If you want to do something then you have to do just that, you have to do something.

When it comes to writing as I start to write I often think that something is wrong, or that something doesn't work, or that I would rather it take a different direction, at which point I rework what I have done.  Changing things, adding more, or sometimes starting over.  The point is the more you do it the more the wheels of thought turn.  Doing something even if it is something that isn't worthy of your skills or your talent opens your eyes to what you want to do.  Knowing exactly what you want to do is as much about knowing what you do not want to do.  The more you know what you do not want to do the narrower the possibilities become until you realise what it is you do want.  With writing this takes the form of abandoning various story lines and concepts that you know would never work, but in trying them out you often discover what would work better than what you tried.  In Mathematics this is called trial and improvement, in life we call it trial and error, in either case the key word is trial.  If you don't try then you will never succeed, yes, you may fail, but if you never try then you have already failed before you have even begun.  As they say the only true failure is the failure to try.

We often look on our failures as things which we would rather forget.  As things that are negative, that have no merit and no place in our lives.  The truth is that the learning process no matter what it is we wish to learn, involves repetition, it involves accepting our failures and trying again.  No human ever crawled across the floor as a baby, stood up and walked and never fell over.  Learning to walk, learning to talk, learning to read and write, these are all things that we try and fail and try again and keep trying until we get it right.  We may not remember the trials we went through to master these skills, but we do not think anything less of anyone who made the same mistakes.  Making mistakes is part of what makes us human.  Why then do we try to hide our failures from others?  Why is it when we meet people we feel embarrassment about admitting the things we did wrong?  No matter who you are, no matter where you work, or play, or study, or dream, or think, or plan, or scheme, we all make mistakes at some point. 

There are two types of people I do not trust instinctively, those who say they have never failed at something, and those who always smile.  I don't care how happy you are in your life if you constantly smile all it tells me is that you have something to hide and you are dishonest.  You can be as defensive about that as you want.  I am not the only person that thinks this way either so if you are one of those people then all I have to say is you are fooling no-one but yourself.  At the end of the day if you can't be yourself and be true to yourself how can you ever expect anyone to trust you to be honest to them.