The Failure That I Had to Make

I wrote before about setting myself a quota not of successes or prize finishes, but of failures and eliminations. In reality, though, challenging something and being defeated can hurt so badly that, right afterward, you may regret it enough to curse yourself for ever having set such a goal.

Blessing, benchmark, accumulating numbers. In the moment of failure or elimination, the body, pushed to its limit, has no faith in any of those slogans. No matter how many times you tell yourself that this is proof that you challenged something, the bottom of your stomach goes cold, your hands shake, and something breaks somewhere deep in your chest, leaving you with no clean way to handle it.

Even so, most failures are not truly beyond recovery. Fortune and misfortune are always braided together, and even after having a life full of failures, I still do not know whether there is such a thing as an absolutely irrecoverable failure.

—

When I think of irrecoverable failure in aerial silks, the first things that come to mind are fatal falling accidents, or life-altering injuries that affect daily life permanently. The fatal fall of Sarah Guillot-Guyard, an experienced professional aerialist with Cirque du Soleil, during a performance of Kà, is far too well known.

One aerialist I know personally and very well also once told me that, the morning after a fall during aerial practice, her body simply would not move, and she could not get herself out of bed, though she told the story brightly, laughing as she spoke. As for me, I developed a herniated disc that was almost certainly caused by aerial, and for about 6 months now I have had sharp pain running through my lower back, along with numbness in my leg. It has progressed to the point of interfering with daily life, and painkillers like Loxonin have, against my will, become my new best friend.

If you look only at those outcomes, of course they are not desirable. Whether such outcomes can be blessed as proof of challenge is something each person will judge differently. Once the result of an injury is known, it is easy to say that one should not have pushed that far. But it is also true that there is hardly anyone who has taken a sport seriously and never been injured.

As an instructor entrusted with someone else’s body, of course one must never make students do dangerous things. More generally, if any being or system is genuinely capable of suffering, then it deserves moral consideration. Safety comes first, and skipping safety procedures for example, is not a challenge, and so by definition it is not even a failure.

But what about your own body? In the end, here I am, still alive. As for myself, if I had challenged something with everything I had and, as a result, failed so completely that I even lost my life, I cannot quite deny the thought that even that might have been all right. No one lives without wishing for something, and wishes have that kind of machinery inside them.

—

And even if anything ends in an irrecoverable failure, you do not have to hand over all the good memories that came before it to that bad ending.

Sarah lost her life in the end because of an aerial performance. But that does not mean that the time she devoted to aerial, the happiness she found through aerial, the friends she met, the joyful hours she had, or all the brilliance she had shown until then are overwritten and turned into something hateful. Those memories should still shine, unchanged, even now.

So even if something ends badly, that ending is still only one instance. It does not negate all the good times that came before it. Those memories remain good memories, unchanged, precious parts of your life.
Human beings have a habit of rewriting an entire memory under the impression left by its ending, but if you can resist that habit, then one single bad instance does not have to tarnish all the good memories that came before it. You can let good memories remain good memories in themselves, instead of surrendering them to the bad ending that followed.

Memory is not sealed forever in ice. It is rewritten each time you return to it, and what determines the overwriting is what you continue to remember. Only those who keep remembering the side that shone can keep that brightness burning.

—

When we speak of irreversible aftereffects, there are failures in human relationships as well as unwanted physical outcomes such as injury. Losing a friend, too, can be one of those decisive failures, and a friend once lost cannot simply be made again. That alone is reason enough to cherish the friends you have. Even so, there are things you only realize once you have experienced loss. In the first place, many friendships themselves begin as the result of some challenge.

Looking back, there have been many challenges that ended in outcomes I did not want. Some of them came through aerial silks, and many did not.

You may call them failures, or you may choose not to. But if they were failures, then I think every one of them was the result of an unavoidable challenge, a failure that I had to make. I had no real choice, and I doubt even the person I am now could have stopped my past self.

I believe that you and I both simply made the best choice available to us at the time.