Success in Failure

My recent days I've been spending in Port Townsend regathering everything of myself again. Since that April Fools of '09, when I literally wandered out into the snow with a backpack, my external and internal understanding of the world has undergone some cataclysmic swings. Some of them have been horribly misguided, many others have been quite positively influential even if those new recognitions meant working on shifting key identities of myself, or weeding them out at long last. Its 16 months and 20 days later and now here I am finally sitting down for a few months to shuffle through these things, whether consciously or not.

On the face of it I've hit an all time low in finances since I allowed myself to go into debt for the first time since I left Denver last April. After the strange extremes of how money seems to ebb and flow around me I'm not so much worried as I am alert to new dramatic shifts coming. Because of these account lows I've taken this time to pick up some work again, back at Tyler St. once more as well as some new farm work at a place called Red Dog Farm. This farm work is where my thought process for today begins.

Failure is something of an intrigue to me lately. It has always been something that I have a hard time conceding to internally. That admission alone has been the past week's work, perhaps longer. I have far less hesitation admitting publicly I'm wrong, or have not done as I intended, or, in fact, let someone down by my inability or negligence, than I do accepting it in myself. Actually, I haven't been able to pick out a time in my memory in which I did honestly admit that to myself. My standard subconscious standby has always taken up crutches on being a little odd or eccentric, and therefore not being completely understood.

This side route to success, in my head, bypassing the crash of failure has allowed me long detoured scenic routes around genuine problems and cycles I struggle with in life. They may be long time patterns like the ones I illustrated in my last post with romantic relationships, or they could simply be fucking up at work for the day. I certainly don't think this is a problem unique to me either. On the contrary, I think everyone suffers from it to some degree or another. In the end, I definitely believe I've made headway on such issues in my life, but I definitely don't think I addressed them as quickly and efficiently as I could have had I the ability to admit my inability when reaching my borders.

This thought has struck me today because I was working for the farm at the market in town. I've always hated starting new jobs because I have always hated being "the new guy". I was quite pleased when I graduated into middle school and the fifth grade moved out of my elementary school to the middle school with me. In this way I didn't have to be in the bottom class of my new level of schooling, and this meant quite a bit to me then. Being that new guy equates to me as being that guy who doesn't know shit and is therefore useless.

When I first started working in coffee, ten years ago, I was notoriously awful at my job. I couldn't grasp any of the basics on how to steam milk, pull a shot, I couldn't remember prices, and I took forever to ring people through. For the first two months I jumped at opportunities to clean things, anything, because it meant not having to do anything I couldn't do, and there was little pressure to get it done. The only way I retained my position through those first two months was mainly due to having a manager who had a son who was a bit of a screw up and she thought if she kept giving me a chance it was like continuing to give her son a chance. Fortunately right around the time she was fired I suddenly became quite competent literally over night. That's another story though.

During those two months I hated going to work because it was a daily reminder that I could not do something, and not just something, but something that paid minimum wage and could be done by a 14 year old. I excused myself internally with reasons like not being a coffee drinker, not belonging to the snobbish latte culture, not caring to spend the effort to learn a minimum wage trade when I had just come from doing quite well in the harder to break into film world. Absolutely none of these excuses had anything to do with my actual ability.

I am a slow learner, I know this about myself. I also want to be able to do everything, and want that knowledge in my head now rather than after practicing it a bit. Once I have acquired a new skill I, of course, take great pride in how much effort I put into learning it, but until then I simply want it done and to be the great hidden master of it through sheer intuitive talent. I'm speaking, of course, about the grand world in my head, not my actual external behavior, though it does seep out from time to time.

Today I was learning something new again. I've never done much in the way of farming, and I, of course, don't know much about how Red Dog does things when at the market in town. Things are rushed and teaching someone how to stack beets and carrots is not priority to simply getting the stand up and going. What I recognized this time around in being put in a position I didn't know much about I felt my usual excuses of why I was doing things slowly rise, but this time I saw myself bat them down as stupid excuses.

All of this happened internally, but I watched my ego grumble in the early morning of not being properly trained, not having done this sort of thing much, being used to my freedom of not working on the road rather than slaving day to day for a penny. Then I saw something new come up where I said to myself for the first time probably "I just don't know how to do this, but I'm learning". Its such a simple, stupid concept, but for some reason before I'd always had trouble seeing myself as a student of anything.

Lately I've been reading somethings about maturity and maturing. What it is to be a child in comparison to an adult. What I'm getting out of it is that the separation is mainly that a child knows no boundaries or limits to themselves, an adult does. A child believes they can do absolutely everything and anything, an adult knows they need to work within the limits of their capabilities. This isn't to say one can't do anything, the difference seems to be that the adult knows one has to do the little things along the way to achieve it. Getting to the moon isn't impossible, it just takes understanding all the complexities of reality in the way.

My first real lesson toward understanding this came back in 2003 when I started my walk across the US. I had been talking about doing that since I was 11, but it took Ingrid being interested in joining me before I started even considering the necessary steps to be taken. What seemed like such an out of proportion behemoth project for those 15 years in between dreaming it up and doing it now seems like something obviously possible and achievable, just as its obvious we as a people can get to the moon where as it was a joke before the 1950s. What the hardest part of the journey was just taking that first step. This was taken in the summer of '02, not the spring of '03, with the assessing of what small steps needed to be taken.

None of this is a new concept to the world, but I also feel like it doesn't hurt to paraphrase it once again in yet another forum. I believe finding ones limitations is essential in finding out the extremes of ones abilities. To know ones borders is to know where to push. Think of how absurd it seems to expand ones territory within boundaries of what's already there. The old instruction from the art world seems to apply. Master the known before pushing into the unknown. Most of us simply like the sensation that we're breaking new ground when we push against ethereal walls, but in reality we're just going in circles.

These days, this is my experiment. As can be seen in my last few posts, discovering my limitations is my current fascination. People have been asking me if I'm okay these days I think because its not hard to see I'm in a bit of a dark space right now. The truth of it, however, is that I feel incredibly good as I go through this process. Its going to take me a very long time before I can admit to all of my limitations. Identifying my failures on the spot as they come is key to that. That identification separates the identities my ego relates to from what I really am and where my real boundaries are. Through that I can then learn how to expand beyond them.

I've always been one not only to want to rebuild the world, but rebuild it from ashes. I'm beginning to see that I will never be able to even be close to doing that unless I give up the impossibility of that dream and start to see what I'm really capable and not capable of.