2011 Streak Day 146/365: Learning from failure

2011 Streak Day 146/365: Run - 4.72 miles, Time - 45min 27sec, Weather - showery, grey clouds blown along by the wind

The weather has been too dry recently and we need rain, so I am not unhappy that today has been wet. But it has not been set-in steady rain, rain clouds have come and gone, which makes the timing of a run difficult.

It's not that I want to come across as a wuss or a procrastinator (though I could be both) but there is no point in getting unnecessarily wet. 

Today I was lucky. The moment I got my kit on it started to rain,  so I paused and watched a video of the address J K Rowling gave to Harvard graduates in 2008. It was well worth the time. She had two themes: lessons that can be learnt from failure and the importance of the imagination.

The sort of imagination she was talking about was not of the wild fantasy sort but the kind that enables you to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to empathise, understand and take action. The lessons of failure came from her own experience as a single mother living in poverty, clinging onto the dream of her novel.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Afterwards I went out and the clouds soon cleared in the strong wind and everything was fine and I had a theme for the run: I thought about stripping away inessentials and concentrating on the situation as it is.

My long break from running was not really rock bottom, but sometimes it felt like it, and I am treating my current program as foundation building. I now realise with greater clarity than before that the only essential is the ability to keep on running. It doesn't matter how fast or how long. If I have illusions about my abilities and think I should be faster than I actually am (which I do), they should all be stripped away.

All that matters is to keep on going.