I was standing in line at a local bookstore several days before Christmas, waiting to pay for the usual armful of Christmas gifts, when I spotted one of those little books that had been strategically placed near the point of purchase. It was titled How Far Will You Go: Questions to Test Your Limits. I picked it up, and found that it was simply a book filled with questions, each of which contained an adjective or adverb in the superlative degree--words like best, least, most, dirtiest, worst, highest, wildest, biggest. For a small book, its questions probe life with surprising power. Here is a sampling:
In what ways are you least understood?
In what situation would you most enjoy being temporarily invisible?
What would you most readily die for?
When have you come closest to meeting the devil?
What kind of power do you want most?
What was the most difficult choice you were ever forced to make?
When were you most disappointed in yourself?
What one experience do you most desire that you haven't had yet?
What is the most sacred thing in your life?
What's the most daring thing you've ever done sexually with someone of the gender you don't prefer sexually?
What was the hardest you ever fought for something?
In what area of your life are you neediest?
What about the world would you most like to change?
What is the biggest risk you have ever taken?
The purpose of the book, say authors Evelyn McFarlane and James Saywell, is to ask the question: how large is your life? They believe that the answers to these questions can help us discover the edges of our lives, the outer and inner limits that we have already experienced, or have yet to find. If the size of one's life can be measured by the distance between its extremes, they conclude, these questions can help reveal the surprising breadth of each of our lives.
In a sense, it's like asking about the range of a singer's voice or the extent of a bird's migration. How large is your life emotionally, physically, vocationally, spiritually? Do you take a minimalist approach, merely seeking the next task to be done at work, hoping to meet the minimum requirements as a spouse or partner, only looking to do what is good enough for a volunteer?
Or does your approach to life reveal what the English teachers among us might call a strategy of comparative degree: the better choice with your kids, the harder task at work, the more challenging option in your relationships. These are people who risk coming closer to the edge--not closest, just closer.
But then there are those who are willing to put everything on the line. It's life in the superlative degree or no life at all. These people are the ones who take the biggest risks, fight the hardest battles, desire the most in return. They give to others without measure, love without expectation, hope without limit. They inevitably deal with the greatest disappointments, but they also enjoy the greatest returns. If life were a brokerage account, these are the people who would check "most aggressive" as their preferred strategy. Which gives new meaning to the questions in the book:
Who is the person you know with the freest spirit?
When were you most disappointed in yourself?
What is your worst vice? Your greatest virtue?
What one thing would you most like to abolish?
What would you most like to be remembered for after you die?
It seems to me that one of the consequences of trying to create a large life is that we have to learn how to deal with failure. With any boundary we try to push back--emotional, spiritual, moral, or physical--chances are that we won't be able to do it on the first try or the second. Maybe not even on the twentieth try. The real question is how we deal with those twenty failures. Do we accept them as opportunities to adjust our approach and try again, to risk trying to learn, to grow, to develop in new ways? Or do we take our failures as crushing blows to our character and give up, settling instead for small, safe lives?
In her book titled Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Invention and Discovery, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes an interview with the inventor Jacob Rabinow, an electrical engineer who holds more than two hundred patents for inventions in the fields of optical character recognition technology, mail-sorting machinery, and electric motors. In the interview, Rabinow specifies three things you need to break new ground as an inventor. First, he says, you need to have a tremendous amount of information--an enormous database, to put it in modern parlance. If you are a musician, you need to know a lot about music and to have heard many, many different pieces. In other words, if you were born on a desert island and have never heard a piece of music, you are not likely to become a Beethoven and write the Fifth Symphony.
Second, you need the motivation to work with the information you have at hand, play with it over a long period of time, pull the data apart and put it back together in new and different ways, even strange and unusual ways. The point is to use what is already there to create something entirely new. And volume counts. You need to create a lot of music, generate a lot of ideas, write a lot of poetry, produce a lot of whatever. It's true that some of it will be junk. But you cannot decide beforehand to think only of good ideas, or to write only beautiful music. In order to give yourself a chance to produce something good or even great once in a while, you have to produce a lot of trash as well.
But the trash has to be thrown out straightaway: that's Rabinow's third point. There is no point in spending time pursuing further options that are bound to fail. Part of knowing which ideas are promising and which are not has to do with knowledge and experience--which is another reason why the large database is important in the first place. The bottom line, according to Rabinow, is that you need a very large wastebasket in order to create something good. You have to be willing to fail many times in order to succeed even once.
Thomas Edison, midway through the more than 10,000 experiments which eventually led to the invention of the light bulb, was asked by a journalist why he persisted in his experiments after having failed so often. "Young man," Edison reportedly replied, "You don't understand. I have not failed at all. I have successfully identified 5,000 ways that will not work. That just puts me 5,000 ways closer to finding the way that will work."
To put it a different way, success in life is not something we can approach directly. Significant success is usually an indirect consequence of the willingness to accommodate failure in the superlative degree. It's a lesson I'm grateful I learned early enough in my life to make it to All Souls. Allow me to explain.
I was always a good student growing up. I made good grades in high school and college, and most of my teachers liked me. They always wrote me good recommendations. Which is why, when I decided to go to seminary--what a Mennonite young man with some talent was expected to do in those days--I applied to and was accepted by Princeton. Three years later, I graduated, first in my class. The question was: what to do next. I decided, after a brief period of thought, that I wanted a Ph.D.--not in anything in particular, just a Ph.D. But in what?
I didn't think theology was quite the answer. I thought I knew enough already about theology and Biblical studies. Perhaps classics was a better choice. In college, I had switched to a classics major midway through my sophomore year, and had liked it a lot it. Homer, Thucydides, Euripides, Virgil: what could be better then another four years of reading the classics? So, I applied to about a dozen of the best classics programs and was accepted by ten of them.
There was a problem, however. My classics background was appallingly meager. I had taken four years of Greek; eight was the average of the other applicants. I had taken only two years of Latin; ten was the average. I had not taken even one classical history course. Many of the other applicants had spent a semester or two teaching classical history at an academy in Rome. Why was I accepted in the first place, you ask? Heaven knows. It might have been my essay, which apparently successfully argued that my lack of preparation was actually an asset, rather than a liability.
In any event, I decided to stay at Princeton--after the director of the graduate program agreed to give me an extra year or two in the program to get up to speed with my languages and history. But then, three weeks before the program actually began, he died suddenly of a heart attack. It turned out that his replacement, a recently tenured Latin professor, would honor no prior deals as to extra time. He looked at the language placement exams--my performance was dreadful, of course--and suggested that I resign immediately from the program. After a dismal first semester and a chat with the Dean of the graduate school, I reluctantly did just that. After a lifetime of academic success, I had failed. Spectacularly. Of course, I had put myself in a position to do so, though I had no appreciation of what I would eventually gain as a result of that failure.
If the point is always to succeed in life, my withdrawal from the program at Princeton was indeed bad news. It was a painful failure for me, and it ushered in a very difficult period of personal reassessment and vocational review. But, if the point is not always to succeed but to flourish in life, my failure at Princeton was good news. To make a rather long story mercifully short, the result of that failure eventually led to a change of course and career that led me here, to All Souls.
Michael Jordan, arguably the most talented athlete ever to grace the hardwood floor of a basketball court, put it this way: "I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On twenty-six occasions I have been entrusted with the ball to take the final, game-winning shot--and missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
It's a lesson Helen Keller knew well, as did Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Any worthwhile expansion of life's domain or value requires persistence and imagination. In other words, to flourish in life we must learn to accept failure not as defeat, but as an opportunity to learn and grow. The difference between people who fail and people who ultimately succeed is that successful people never let their failures stop them. They keep on trying, pushing back the boundary, exploring new ground.
The question is this: how far are we willing to go? What risks are we willing to take to love our children, to excel at our jobs, to show up for our friends? How close to the edge are we willing to walk to fight injustice, to combat racism, to speak out for those who have no voice and to stand up for those who have no power? How hard are we willing to work to extend the domain of beauty, and peace, and love in this world? How large is your life, and mine? How far will we go? Copyright AllSouls 2000.