The opportunity of failure

I have had this idea floating around in my head for the past three days to write something about failure. Three times I started to blog and three times I failed as I got half way into it and stopped and deleted it.

I was thinking about the idea of failure and how to work through my thoughts this morning as I was making my coffee and I thought about President Obamas phrase that because of the failures of our economy and many of the issues that our country faces we have a historic opportunity. I let that phrase roll around in my mind.

These past couple of months I have witnessed how the people around me deal with the failure or the fear of failure. In my own family failure has been the driving force. In November my father's older brother died after his body failed to fight off a cancer. My uncle lived a wild life and at the end spent his last days trying to confess the failures of his life so that he could get himself right with God. In December my father fell of a ladder in his garage when a pile of lumber fell on him. He spent about 4 days in the hospital with broken bones and a fractured skull. His memory which was already a little shakey, took a "beating" as well. I witnessed as he failed to remember the details of the accident, his time in the hospital, and watched as he struggled to recover. As each doctor came into the hospital room to ask him what happened he kept saying that he failed to get out of the way of the falling boards. This past Monday my mother's older sister began the final process of dying. The doctors were failing to stop the process that began suddenly 2 weeks ago when she was admitted to the hospital. This weekend she died.

If I look at these past months from the point of failure I have witnessed the failing health of relatives and the medical communities response. But looking at the same events from a different vantage point I have found that my brother and my sisters have talked more in the past three months than we have in years. I've made a conscious effort to stay more in touch with my parents. Family through these failures have become more important to me. This is an opportunity to reconnect to people who I had taken for granted that would always be there and would always be able to take care of themselves.

This economy continues to falter. We see the ripples of that through every part of our community. In order to continue to operate difficult choices have to be made. Yet I find something positive in returning to find our what's really important and how to make that the focus.

I just held auditions last week and there were almost 70 people cast out of 150 who auditioned. For some they had exhilaration as were cast in a show for the first time or got the part that they were striving for. For others their disappointments were overwhelming. They felt hurt and angry at the their failure to get cast. Some who had never experienced not being cast felt their disappointment the most. Others accepted their disappointments and offered to get involved in other ways with the shows. Some will come overcome that disappointment and others will not.

Each time we select a season of plays I fear failure. It doesn't matter that I've helped produce over 400 plays at the theatre since I came to work there. In the back of my mind is always the question- Will this show be the one that fails? That sense of being a fraud, that I've only been lucky up to this point because I really don't know what I'm doing and I have to work that much harder to make sure that I don't fail runs rampant through myself and some of the most successful people I know. When we do a Beauty and the Beast, High School Musical, or Wizard of Oz it's like throwing a ball higher and higher in the air and trying to hit it. Each show presents a bigger risk of failure. Yet each show presents an opportunity to for me to grow as an artist.

Each failure or risk of failure is a challenge to us to grow. I'm reminded often of Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey. The person gets the call and sets out on a journey. At some point he will be tested. In this test he will have to journey down inside himself. He will have to fail to protect himself. In a sense the person who he was dies and for a period of time he is lost. But then he finds new strengths and is helped by the presence of a spirit or God to come back up out of the ground with a new understanding. He is resurrected. It is his journey to bring this new wisdom back to others to share. In the hero's journey he shares this until he gets the next call. For me that is the risk of failure and the opportunities it presents.