As I stood at the bus stop this evening, waiting to go home and listening to music as I often do during my commute, I opened the latest book I’m reading—Work as a Spiritual Practice by Lewis Richmond—and picked where I’d left of this morning, when I arrived a the bus stop by my office. It seemed appropriate that Shirley Horne’s version of “It’s Not Easy Being Green”—one of the songs that would be added to the soundtrack of my life, if my life had a soundtrack— began to play just as I started reading the chapter on failure.
It’s not that easy being green;
Having to spend each day the color of the leaves.
When I think it could be nicer being red, or yellow or gold…
or something much more colorful like that.It’s not easy being green.
It seems you blend in with so many other ord’nary things.
And people tend to pass you over ’cause you’re
not standing out like flashy sparkles in the water
or stars in the sky.
In the few years of living I have under my belt, I’ve had more than a passing acquaintance with failure; more of one than I’d honestly have prefered. I’ve written about it on this blog, and struggled with putting past failures into context. For some reason, those that have been most vivid in my memory, and the most vivid to recast have been those that occured in the workplace. So, I actually looked forward to reaching Richmond’s chapter on failure, just to see how he would approach it from a specifically Buddhist perspective.
Having been in the workplace for a decade or so, I’m used to what I call the “office euphamisms.” You’re probably familiar with it too. It’s the language in which problems become “challenges” and terminations or lay-offs become “opportunities for growth,” and in which people are never “fired” but instead always leave to “seek new opportunities.” So I expected some of that. But from the beginning, Richmond speaks of failure almost as a gift.
Failure is difficult, but sometimes is can also be an advantage and a sign of strength, paritcularly for managers or business owners. …There is no curriculum to learn how to fail. It is not taught as a subject in business school, nor can we get credit for it in college. Yet it is one of the most valuable experiences in life, in both a practical and spiritual sense. And when we are failing, it is hard to know, in the midst of the situation, what is failure and what is not.
Richmond writes about how a company he once worked for was looking for a new president. The senior managers got a confidential memo concerning the candidates. For one candidate, under the section titled “Weaknesses” the search team noted “Candidate has not failed.” It took me a minute to absorb that in this case not having failed was a weakness. The company was in trouble, and needed someone who had gone down with the ship before so that he or she would know what to do if it happened again.
After reading that, I stopped to consider that I’ve had experience not only in going down with the ship, but also with floudering in the surf and eventually slogging back to shore to start building the next ship. The funny thing is that I never though of it as a strength before. It’s just what I’ve always done because that’s all there was to do at times. Now, when the hull starts leaking I’m less likely to start panicking than I am to start bailing, patching holes or manning the lifeboats. Now I can usually tell how much time there is before the ship breaks apart and hits bottom.
If there’s anything else I’ve gained from my own experiences with failure, I’d have to say it’s compassion. I find it easier to identify with people who are struggling now. I’m more likely to offer encouragement and a helping hand, if I can. And I’m certainly less likely to look too critically at someone else’s failures without also considering what they’ve learned and gained from the experience of failure, considering what I seem to have learned from my own. I guess I consider it hard-earned knowledge, and I guess it has more value than I’ve given it before.
Funny. Not long ago I wrote about feeling somewhat envious of people who seem to have experienced few if any failures in their lives or careers. Now I guess I realize that because of my own failures I may have some valuable understanding and knowledge that they don’t. It’s part of what makes me … me, I guess. And maybe that’s OK. Maybe it’s more than OK. Maybe it’s actually something great, valuable, and useful. Maybe that is something I have to offer to others. Maybe, at least I hope, I can pass that on to my son. Maybe that’s a gift I can pass on to him.
That reminds me of the other half of the song I mentioned earlier and which inspired the title of this post.
But green’s the color of Spring.
And green can be cool and friendly-like.
And green can be big like an ocean, or important like a mountain,
or tall like a tree.When green is all there is to be
It could make you wonder why, but why wonder why?
Wonder, I am green and it’ll do fine, it’s beautiful!
And I think it’s what I want to be.