Tag: failure

The Guilty Magpie Wants It All

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I’ve started learning a new hobby. It would be nice if it could evolve into something someone is willing to pay me for but until that point I’ll keep it stored away in the hobby with intent file. I’ve a had a few of those, it’s probably a little fatter than it should be. It’s good to be a jack of all trades in a way but I quite fancy the relaxed possibilities that come with being a master of at least something. I heard once happiness, or at least a part of the whole happiness package, is to be a master of something because it allows you to be relaxed and content with what inevitably will take up a large part of your time. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to report on that. It only takes ten thousand hours to be a master apparently, about ten years I once worked out. Think of something you started ten years ago but didn’t carry on, doesn’t feel that long ago now eh.

What is it that makes us give up on things? Too difficult perhaps. Or we’re just lazy. I’m usually a little distracted and a little lazy. The difficulty doesn’t bother me because I’m usually naive enough to just jump in without much thought about whether I’ll be actually capable enough. I’ve also not tried anything overly taxing like theoretical physics so it’s hard to say what my limitations are. Usually myself though to be honest. I can be a lazy bugger and well I like new shinny things and once one hobby losses it’s lustre it’s quite easy to be distracted by another. Is this a thing we can blame society on I wonder, this short attention span, or is it something we need to step up to and own. Probably a little bit of both, you know how it is.

I don’t really want to talk about myself too much though, I know there is a lot of I this and I that in here. One of the reasons for this though is that we see others being successful and imagine we alone are useless, that we are alone in this world with our suffering. It turns out we’re not. It turns out we’re all useless or incompetent or incapable or whatever detrimental thing we’ve learnt to class ourselves as at something. In an ideal world I would love this new hobby of mine to evolve into something that defines my life in a positive way but I’m also aware theres a good chance it won’t. Do I beat myself up over this, let’s be honest I’m probably not going to. I know I’m not alone in this world when it comes to such things and quite often what we struggle with the most is the idea that we are, that we’re the first to have messed up. Well we’re not and I guarantee there is a long line of people who have already made that same series of ridiculous choices. Don’t beat yourself up. There’s always some other shinny thing just around the corner.

Don’t Taste The Wasp Twice

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We as a species have an inbuilt response to new things, we fear them. There is a practical reason for that and it is rational; new is unknown and unknown could mean danger. As a species we have managed to survive, adapt and evolve to the point we’re at in our evolutionary cycle. I don’t doubt one reason for our success so far has been down to instinctively following that practical approach mentioned above. Is it instinctive though? When we are young children we try to touch or eat anything new, it appears we sense next to no danger in anything, yet as adults we have become cautious if not neurotically fearful. That would suggest we are taught to fear new and unknown things but then puppies and adult dogs mirror human growth fear patterns too. Perhaps puppies learn new can mean danger because sometimes they experience the pain of discovering new things, like the taste of a wasp, or a dogs parenting is just not something obvious to my untrained eyes. Can we then take that further and use it to explain why we are so weary of new sources of information, or even new information that may contradict our previously held beliefs.

I suppose it is probably quite a straightforward idea, we distrust new sources because they are unknown and we haven’t built up a relationship of trust with them. We reject new information because our current beliefs are known to us and with them we have so far survived to this point in life. With them we have safety and life, potentially this unknown new information may lead to danger and the taking away of either our safety or in the extreme our life. There is also the issue of narrative to take into consideration, what doesn’t fit our narrative we are likely to dismiss but I’ll not go down that avenue this time.

I was sent a link to a video on YouTube by a friend who has a differing set of ideals and beliefs about how best we should approach the world than I do. I rarely bother engaging him in discussion anymore because neither of us come close to seeing the others perspective and I always end it feeling exhausted and frustrated that I’ve wasted an evening arguing with a brick wall. When I received this video I assumed immediately it would relate to one of his points previously made, which it did, and in my mind I had already rejected it before even contemplating watching it. My initial response was to see it was a YouTube video and dismiss it as worthless. There are many useful videos on YouTube and I have taught myself how to do all sorts of things through them, but videos of a political or social nature are quite often just a pile of tosh. I had already rejected the point because of the source platform. I decided to watch it a little, not the full one hour because I have better things to do, and did some research on the speaker and his organisation. Seemingly they are of a different persuasion to me but I still watched and tried to listen to the message. After ten disagreeable minutes I gave up because I found him frustrating, it appears you can’t argue with a pre-recorded person. I do understand why angry people comment now but I still refuse to get involved in that game. Ultimately my point is that I like to think I gave the speaker the opportunity and I listened with a clear mind but it’s not easy when you already think the platform the information is on and the source of the information are unreliable and bullshit.

Absorbing new information is clearly an incredibly challenging task. We struggle to absorb anything that is new because it is unknown and potentially dangerous, and we struggle to accept anything contradictory to our present set of beliefs as it challenges what has so far kept us safe. The YouTube example above is an easy one to dismiss because the contents and the platform are like the Daily Star of video journalism but sometimes we get contradictory information from credible sources and this can be hard to accept and equally dismiss.

The more I delve into these things the more I’m starting to realise just how hard, if not impossible, it is being some kind of discerning, moral and decent person. Here I am, just like yesterday back to the fallible human. Is failure what makes us human, or perhaps the ability to recognise and improve on our past failures. It is okay to be fallible. It is unavoidable clearly, but is it only acceptable if and when we try and avoid repeat failure. Being conscious of our previous failures, accepting that they are inevitable and pushing on in the search of perfection, or at the very least an acceptable success. Don’t try and taste the wasp twice, it’s all so simple now, if only I had realised that earlier.

Resolutions Update

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Why do something tomorrow if we can do it today said absolutely nobody ever without a big chunk of delusion and faux wisdom running through their minds. How’s everyones New Years resolutions going then? Did everyone put off all the healthy good things they were going to do, binging on all the bad stuff until New Years day, wake up feeling like shit before deciding they’ll start on the second of January and then realising the weekend was coming up and they would definitely get onto it first thing on Monday morning? Who actually got onto it first thing this morning, or did everyone decide that today was the slip up cheat day and that one hundred percent they’ll definitely be up an hour early tomorrow morning to go for that run? Who actually thinks they will? Sounds all a little familiar does it? Don’t worry we’re all in this together.

Intentions are nothing without discipline. Seemingly we live in a world bereft of the latter. I accept I am full of wild assumptions and that not everybody has failed miserably with their new solutions to finding happiness and health. I also know there’s a healthy dose of sceptical realism bouncing around in this exhausted lethargic mind of mine and without a doubt over half the people who made resolutions have already given up, they may not have realised they have but they have. I’m not saying they won’t pick them up again, or for the first time, and really crack on with turning their lives around, not all is lost of course. I know I’ve not given up hope, perhaps it’s merely delusional, but I still believe I can make it.

One of the most beautiful things about humans is that we’re fallible. We love putting ourselves on some magical pedestal and then just as quickly crash down to earth when we decide a day on the sofa is a much better idea than a day of effort. Fallibility in ourselves and others can be frustrating but when we consider we have conscious thought and are aware of our own actions yet still continue to mess up and do the wrong thing, well it’s a joy to behold. Perhaps it’s a little too much of that yin yang beer but what a dull and unbalanced world we would have were we not capable of failure. Of course failure may just be redefined as the median shifts but we do seem to have a rather quant approach to that balance right now. I also don’t know any other, but that also means I do know any worse either. That’s a small bonus to redress the balance.

The Yin Yang Brewery

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The beer didn’t brew properly. It is unclear at which point it went wrong but certainly it didn’t carbonate although I doubt that was all. In two bottles I used honey instead of the sugar they provided and they nearly exploded when I opened them, although they still tasted like shit. It is possible that the beer wasn’t kept warm enough, the instructions that came with it suggested keeping it at 18-20 degrees but I found things online suggesting 20-22 degrees so that may have been an issue. I also didn’t properly use the little oxygen / carbon dioxide thing, which has a proper name that I can’t remember, but which you put in the little hole at the top of the fermenting barrel. There were no instructions on it with the brewing kit as a whole so I just put it in place but discovered halfway through the brewing process that it was supposed to have either distilled water or some spirit to help filter the air going in and out. I put whisky in it but it may have been too late. I did notice on about day two that something had happened with the fermentation process and it seemed like it had risen pretty high so maybe that thing without liquid was an issue. Saying that it did ferment I think because the barrel was full of yeasty dough like gunk at the bottom so something happened.

Clearly then it could have been many things but what I am left with now is this sickly liquid, not thick like syrup but it seems as if it would like to become so. The two bottles which I used honey as the sugar are now gone, one partly over the wall, sink and table top as I opened it and the rest in my belly. There was one bottle which seemed to carbonate slightly using the sugar they gave, that is also now drunk as is one of the sickly sugary bottles that didn’t work. I suspect then that the rest will be going straight down the drain which is a terrible shame but the inevitable conclusion to a failed attempt.

Is this the end of my beer making career, most likely not but that will probably be down to whether I view it as an obstacle in the road or an experience to learn more, which would ultimately make it a success. That then would be the lesson we could learn from every situation that doesn’t work out as we had initially thought and hoped it would. These moments are not failures, but opportunities, now you know more about what you are trying to achieve and yourself in the the process. What a wonderful opportunity failure is, why do we not see it for the balancing yin and yang that it is and as some bad negative thing. It will only ever be how we view it and that is the one thing we at least have control over.