As the hero of my own story–and aren’t we all?–I gloss over the failures. In fact, maybe I never acknowledge failures at all.

I certainly never failed! I was foiled. All my sincere and perfectly honorable efforts were foiled by bad guys. I hadn’t failed. I just hadn’t succeeded yet.

Chris bought me this book by a favorite columnist of his:

The Up side of Down: Why failing well is the Key to Success

Mcardle posits the idea that we need failure to get better. It’s impossible to argue. How else do we learn? Shouldn’t we start at one level of ability and get better?

In my senior year of college, I was entranced by a new professor. He had just come on staff, full of nervousness and tenure ambitions. He proudly said that he had a 4.0.

Imagine! A professor bragging to his students about his grades. I looked at him and thought…If you already knew everything you were learning–knew it so well you aced every single class–what the hell is learning about? His progress was a flat line.

He was proud of it. Of course he was! That’s the way the world works.

Well. That’s the way people work. The world has another way of working too.

If I try to lift something heavy, I won’t succeed. I will fail the first time. If I start with something lighter, and keep at it, I will succeed at the heavy thing. It takes failure

It takes trying.

My daughter is watching The Incredibles. A family of super heroes! They have powers! And they have failings.

The marriage, the kids, the relationships, and trying to make their way in the world.

AND THE EVIL ROBOT MONSTER!

Do you remember how Mr. Incredible fights the robot monster? He throws himself against it.

And it throws him back down.

Fail.

But Mr. Incredible is Super! He gets back up.

He gets back up. Oh God, Yes, he gets back up!

He keeps trying. He fails far more often than he succeeds. And his family does too. All of them fail and fail and fail and fail.

We know. They know. We all know that they will succeed in the end.

Because they are super.

I am not so super. I do not have the super suit to guarantee my ultimate success.

All I’ve got is little old me. I don’t want to fail. I am not at all sure that the fail will lead to something better.

This one life? That’s all I’ve got. What if I fail at it?

California Adventure amusement park, right next to Disneyland, has a ride called Soaring over California. I love the ride.  A huge screen shows arial views of beautiful California scenes. I first loved to watch the orchards and the mountains of Yosemite.

This! This beautiful state is where I live! From Humboldt to San Bernardino counties, I know this land. Near the very end, some jet planes zoom out over the folded desert.

If my feet could touch the ground, that is the moment when I would leap to my feet and punch the air with a cheer. YES! YES THAT! I WANT THAT!! It never fails to make me cry.

why? why am I crying? do I want to fly a plane?

no.

What then? What is the visceral push and joy? Joy tears. What?

I want that kinetic freedom. Those jets are soaring. They are not holding back. All out, no holding back!

Sometimes I see a chance for something. It seems impossible. What do I think is really going to happen if I try for that?

It won’t work. My efforts will fail.

Why am I crying?

McCardle says failure is not a reason to hold back. It can be as rewarding–even more rewarding!–than success.

At the start of anything, I can’t know how it will turn out. And this is the only life I’ve got. I don’t want to hold back for fear of the result. I am beginning to see that if I have a chance to go all out and not hold back, if I take that chance, I’ve already succeeded. Failure is only a by-product.

She’s five.

When she was freshly born, Chris said that having a kid was a countdown until they are five and could go to school. We were panicking at the onslaught of parenthood–the unrelenting nature of another demanding human being.

At five now, she loves books. She has for her entire life. She’d discovered the Reading Rainbow app, and now Levar Burton and his cast of actors read books to her. It’s my job to  cuddle her while the book is being read though.

Happy to delegate the actual reading of the words to the iPad, I listen to Udemy on my iPhone and to to learn my next skill. Cozy,

So the toileting, teeth brushing and bath went forward that night. The towelling and donning of the jammies. The crossing off the day on the whiteboard calendar we’ve given her to track the passage of time was complete.

And the iPad would not boot up.

No problem, right? We’ve got a huge pile of real books.

Veronica was sobbing. She’s tired. “It’s okay, we will read your princess book.” Once I started to read the adventures of Ariel and the shark, she stopped sobbing.

And Daddy came to safe the day, the device was restored and we finished the night with a few stories from Burton’s library.

Somehow, though, things had gotten off track. This small (to my mind) disturbance in the force changed the tone of everything. It’s hard enough for her to fall into the arms of Morpheus on an average night.

As I was flossing Chris came out and said she was sobbing and wouldn’t stop and he’d had it. I took over.

Sitting up in her bed, in her beloved pink bathrobe, her face controted. “Veronica, do you want to be sad?”

Violent head shake. No.

“Would you like to try to be happy?”

Assent.

“Ok, bunny, lay down. Put your head on the pillow.”

A child cries so openly. She caught and held her breath, trying to control the sobs. I remember doing that, fighting for control.

“Breathe” I tell her. We take long breaths together. I can see her visibly relax.

“Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I was supposed to get a story from Reading Rainbow. And then the game wouldn’t come on. That’s not how you are supposed to treat your daughter.”

Well. How unfair is that? It’s broken and we fixed it anyway. She missed ONE STORY of her allotted three.

But according to her, that’s no way to treat your daughter.

Unrealistic expectations abound. Sometimes things break. But for her, that’s no excuse and no comfort.

She’s five. She’ll get over it.

I wonder. Other people push unrealistic expectations on me. Maybe the biggest difference is that she will cry and tell me what her unrealistic expectation is.

A lot of other people will have the expectation, and keep their disappointment tight to their chest. It could be unfair and it could be unavoidable. And still.

The injury remains.

“I’m sorry Veronica. You really wanted Reading Rainbow.”

That’s the thing about parenting. The humanness of it. It’s not fair.

Life isn’t fair.

Hello, Life. I name you Veronica. And you named me Mommy.

Breathe. That’s right. And another one…

That feels better.

While being tucked in to sleep, Veronica told Chris that she couldn’t sleep. Because she had one Featherbone and all the other bones didn’t like it. But the feather bone tickled her so she couldn’t sleep

I used to blog a lot more. I used to get a regular trickle of readers.

Now i have my mailing list, and I get a lot more appreciation from that than my blog got.

Funny how things work out.

And yet, I blog less frequently. I think the quality might be higher, though the output is less

I find myself coming up with ideas for the next weekly wonder throughout the week. and then forgetting almost all of the ideas. Sometimes I remember them, but discard them because they don’t hold my interest.

I wonder if I made it a goal to blog every day if I would.

I wonder.

Would I like my life better if I wrote every day?

that’s the real question, isn’t it?

Would my life be improved?

A book recommended I go outside my comfort zone by ( among other things ) facing the rear of the elevator when it’s full

I tried it today. Elevator full of ladies. I was startled to see al women . I faced them and said “I’ve gathered you here…”

They laughed and kidded with me. I told them I was doing an exercise to go outside my comfort zone. I thanked them for being gracious

A few weeks ago, my employer paid for the group of us to get personality analysis. We rolled our eyes and convened in a hotel convention room for a day of personality training. This particular method (Emergenetics) had the usual four types of personalities, and each person had their recipe of the four types.

And this one had something I hadn’t seen before: behaviors. As they put it, personality is how you think, but people see how you behave. They are not as related as one might expect. They ranked three kinds of behaviors:

Expressiveness- do you express how you feel?
Assertiveness – Do you fight for what you want?
Flexibility – are you willing to compromise?

At the end of the class, we lined ourselves against the wall according to our percentile of each.  I was ranked 95th percentile expressive. So I hung out just below the 100 hanging on the wall.

I was alone.  Most everybody else was bunched way over to the other end of the scale. I moved down a little for the next two, as we went through exercises.

Nothing in my life has ever made it so clear to me what an outlier I am. My co-worker friend cocked his head at my amazement and said  “duh! You didn’t know?”

No. I had no idea.

Well. I am some kind of geyser of thoughts, feeling and words. This can make some other people uncomfortable. Hmm. I want to analyze and manage it better.

I would like to think of a sort of smokescreen. A sort of white noise setting for myself. Not that I don’t want to be myself, yet I would be willing to adjust somewhat for others.

This weekend, I was thinking of this as I heard a favorite podcaster talk about the death and life of Pete Seeger. Seeger spent his life collecting songs that were very singable.

I love those kinds of songs.

I went to go find some Seeger on YouTube. I found his performance of This Land is My Land for the 2009 presidential inauguration.
Look at him. He is singing a song that every American kid learns. His white hair and beard makes me think of every single kindly gray beard who has been kind to me–so many! –over my life.

He waves his arms “Sing! Everybody Sing! You can do it! I’ll give you the words.”

I was crying. I had to turn it off before I upset my daughter.

Look at all those people together! I felt the togetherness…and the sweet childlike chorus.

In between all the weekend work of mothering and maintenance, I thought this might be the sort of thing that I was looking for. A white noise. I would be delighted to burst into song around people at work.

Singing strikes people and disarms them in ways I recognize and do not understand.

I thought I would love to gift that calm and goodwill to other people around me. That sense of us. Would it be possible?

I started singing some of these kid songs, trying them on for size for use in a corporate environment.

Another thing about Pete Seeger is that he was an activist. He had some strong political opinions.

Politics is power, right?

Power.

Power is so nervous. So skittish. It’s hard enough to be confident and secure in one’s own personal field of life. Then add on this political power, and the chaos increases.

I imagined going to a performance review, and singing This land is my land as we prepared to get started.

Hm.

Business power might not like the reminder that we are the same. The suit there might consider it a threat. “THIS IS NOT YOURS! IT’S MINE!”

Not calming.

So I started singing a tune I really like
I’ve been working on the railroad All the livelong day
I’ve been working on the railroad Just to pass the time away
Can’t you hear the whistle blowing? Rise up early in the morn

I rise up early in the morning. Quite early. I wonder what a boss would read into that?

Dang. These are not white noise at all. Music is not to be trifled with. These kids’ songs are more than I realized.

I wish that songs would not make people nervous.

I wish that my expressiveness and assertiveness did not make people nervous.

These are simple and natural things, both of them. Simple and natural isn’t, in our man-made complicated world.

Sorry Boss, it’s me. There’s no helping it.
~

I woke in a quiet bedroom. I was on the trundle bed but my friend was not in her bed. Before I was fully awake I knew something was wrong. Every alarm bell in my heart was ringing.

I knew I was in trouble. How did I know? An empty room with no sound and I knew. What would it be this time?

I tried to tell myself that I was being ridiculous and I didn’t believe myself.

I had to go in the silent house from the basement to the fourth floor to find my friend. She had slept in that spare bedroom instead of her room.

“My dad is really mad. I think you are going to need to apologize.”

She had begged me to stay at her house while I was on missionary furlough. I hadn’t wanted to because I didn’t really like her pastor dad, but she was my friend and I felt sorry for how alone she was.

She continued, not looking me in the face, “He didn’t like how late you came in last night….and there is other stuff. He’ll make an appointment to talk to you in his office.”

How had I known? How had the air vibrated with warning before any discernible message had been given to me?

I will never forget that morning. It is a touchstone to me for intuition.

I am not so great at intuition. I talk myself out of hunches and impressions. I like data and analytical proof.

Some things…a lot of things…the best things?…do not match with analysis.

In the last couple years I have been working on happiness. If happiness is to be analyzed, and God knows I must analyze it because that’s what I do, all experiments must be subjective.  I want to know about my happiness.

I am the scientist and the subject for my happiness experiments.

And to adequately measure my own happiness after I try a hypothesis I have to use intuition.

I hate intuition. It is subjective and not provable and not what I really want.  I began by completely rejecting it as something to pay attention to. As a matter of fact, I doubted it’s existence. You can’t measure intuition!

Then I remembered that one morning on the trundle bed. I could not deny that experience. It happened, it happened to me, and I will never forget it.

So. If intuition exists, how do I grasp it?

I had to step onto the flying carpet. Intuition involves my subjective slippery self.

Having spent a lot of time re-wiring reflexes to the schema of  what I was supposed to want and feel, intuition was not readily accessible.

“Doing what comes natural” and “Follow your bliss” were nonsensical statements for me. I appreciated the sentiment.

My natural bliss was in a corner behind a lot of heavy boxes. At least I think it is. That’s where I started looking.

A couple things I’ve discovered about intuition. It is:

• important
• equal parts easy and impossible
• God’s voice

That last part turns out to be the most important. My intuition is the divine spark of knowing and creation that God put inside of me. That’s why it is so ineffable, and also why it is so important.

I think I want the security of repeatable and provable analysis. What I know, though, is more important than what I can logic out. How frustrating! And how much faith is required to know without security.

I know.

I’m not done moving the heavy boxes out of the way to find my natural intuition. I’m not going to be done for a long time, maybe ever. And I know it’s worth it.

i suppose that if I were abel to use a keyboaard and had the right software, I might not need to carry around a full computer anuymore.

I wonder if I could write out a book on an ipad.

Whoa

Character

Beauty

Self-reliance (Emerson’s essay)

Consciousness

Freedom

Discovery

Courage

Exploring

Spiritual/Religious

Introspection

Ambition

Interests

education/learning

Travel

Adventure

Technology/Systems

Music

Art

Reading

Maker (Like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_culture)

Creation

Cooking/Food

Wandering

Foundation

Family

Home

Cooking/Food

Friends

Ecology/Responsibility

Connection

Career

Partnership

Veronica played crazy eights. Old maid and go fish for the first time last night