On Failure

On Failure:  A Baccalaureate Speech

[In 2008, at the end of my Andover teaching career, I was invited to give the baccalaureate speech at graduation.  It was a singular honor, and I wanted to say something that the graduating seniors had not heard before.  Here is what I said.]

            Thank you so much for inviting me to speak with you tonight.  With all the successes buzzing in the air tonight, I thought I’d say something about failure.  Because for me, failure has been more important than any success, and I want to wish all of you a good failure sometime in your lives.

            Eh? What?  What’s a “good failure”? I can only explain by telling you a story – about my greatest moment of failure. It was a whole summer of failure, actually, 1976:  the culmination of three years of writing novels that left me with an unpublished manuscript, the complete and utter inability to start another novel, no job, and a failing marriage.  My wife had asked that we separate for the summer.  So there I was, in Maine, thirty-two years old, faced with the prospect of moving back home with my parents.  It sure felt like a lot like failure to me.

            So I picked up my life and stuck it on a 10-speed bicycle, a Schwinn LeTour, and began pedaling west.  I had never ridden a 10-speed bicycle before; I bought it the day before I left. Furthermore, I was woefully out of shape (yet one more marker of failure) and on the first day I rode 80 miles. I nearly died.  But I kept plugging, camping under bridges and in fields, occasionally staying with friends, calling home every Sunday to check in with my parents and my estranged wife.

cyclist

            I crossed things:  the Appalachians in New England, the St. Lawrence River into Canada at Buffalo, back into the US at Detroit, the Mississippi into Iowa, all the Great Plains.  In August, I reached Sheridan, Wyoming, and the Bighorn Mountains, a part of the Rockies. It was two o’clock on a hot afternoon when I began to grind my way up.

            By six, I had climbed ten miles of switchbacks and had reached the pass, at 8000 feet.  I was exhausted, legs of rubber, body crusted with sweat, surrounded by boulders the size of George Washington Hall.  And then I looked into the sky to see a cloud the color of midnight sliding over my head.

            There’s no arguing with a cloud like that.  I pulled into the lee of one of those giant boulders, put on my poncho, and sat down beside the Schwinn.  The cloud let loose with torrents of rain, splits of thunder and lightning.  I was, after all, 8000 feet closer to this storm than any I had ever seen back home.  It was a doozy.

            Along with the rain, all my failures came pouring down on me – the unsold writing, the unraveling marriage, the unemployment, the void of future – and for a time I sobbed with despair.  But then a series of events happened that seemed even at the time like a series of miracles.

            The first thing was that the rain stopped.  Almost as quickly as it had begun.  And I began to see things as metaphor.  Yes it rains, but it stops raining, too.  So I got back on my bicycle and set myself onto the road.  And that was a metaphor, as well.  True, I couldn’t stop the rain or the wind, but I could steer and pedal and brake.  All metaphors: I could control some things, and other things I couldn’t control, and those things were not my fault.

            And then the real miracle:  the sun came out.  The sun always comes out.  I stopped and looked behind.  There was that cloud, dark but moving away to the east, and a field of wheat lay before me, shining like burnished gold in the afternoon sunlight. 

            “Ah,” I said.  “That’s why all this has happened to me.  So I can see this sight.  And I am grateful.”

The wheat field in the Bighorn Mountains

            That day was a turning point in what had been until then a fairly irregular life. At the end of August I reached Seattle. In September I had a teaching job near Buffalo, my novel was published, and my wife and I divorced, with sadness and regret, yes, but without anger or hurt.  The next year I was teaching at Milton Academy, where I met a former Andover teaching fellow named Jane Soyster.  Five years after that, Jane and I married and moved to Andover.  And that was 26 years ago.  And here we are.

            So that is why I wish you a good failure.  Failure is what really makes people grow and become strong.  It can do that for you.  Try it all.  Risk everything.  Never give up.  We do possess all the things we need to overcome our failures, as I discovered that afternoon in 1976, when the storm and I wept together high up in the Bighorn Mountains. Bless you all.