If at first you don't succeed, embrace the reprieve
The Age
Saturday March 26, 2011
I LEFT the house with a steady purposeful stride, and crept back, head bowed, three hours later. The cat looked up at me as I opened the front door. "Mummy failed," I pronounced sepulchrally. She sniffed my knee and blinked.The driving test had gone so well until . . . "Pull over," said the inspector, and that was that. Ignominiously driven back to the VicRoads office, and a tram ride home. I hadn't necessarily expected to pass, but failing well, I'm a grown woman, how often does an adult fail at a test? How often do we do tests at all? Our young years are a sequence of mortifying exams and appraisings and evaluations, now there's NAPLAN to contend with as well; the 20s see a merry fiesta of uni assignments and examinations for sexually transmitted diseases; after that, drink-driving tests and psychological profiling are the lot of some, but mostly, as adults, we're let loose. This learning-to-drive lark is the first testing I've done in years, and to fail a test is a shock. I didn't cry. I just went home and wondered if 11 in the morning was too early for a vodka tonic.Failure is like a particle behaving differently at various temperatures. In heavy humid souls, it coagulates with every other failure particle in us and sinks to the bottom of the heart like a great gruesome clot. You didn't just fail, you're a failure. You didn't lose an opportunity, you're a loser. In time the glob of failure may loosen and dissolve; or remain forever, weighing us down so familiar, we think it's normal. Who of us is altogether free from the chronic return of this precipitated gobbet of shame? The recurring dream of sitting a high-school test, frantically aware of how unprepared I am, thrown back on a queasily recognisable sense that my bluff is about to be called.I'd sensed the mistake as soon as I made it. In fact, it turns out that our clever brains are ahead of us: a part briskly called the anterior cingulate cortex doesn't only handle emotion, empathy and decision-making; it lights up when we make an error detecting a conflict between expectation and experience micro-seconds before we realise there is one. Mistake-making is a huge part of neural development. Falling over in a toddler's first steps, gurgling incoherent sounds before speech, and ravenously chomping when at the breast are our earliest failures and lessons. The brains of young people are wonderfully malleable as they absorb this training, and also perilously unfinished: risk-judging and comprehension of consequences are among the last faculties to develop, in the early 20s. Trial and error are often the way to work things out, but sometimes at a terrible cost. It's hard to make anything fail-safe. Nor, perhaps, should we wish it so.But there's nothing wrong with failing a test here and there. In a fresh, clear, buoyant spirit, failure floats away, a mite of mist soon forgotten. "You look relieved," said my instructor as she'd dropped me back at the tram stop. Never mind character-building: sometimes it's desirable to dodge success. Nominated for a literary award some years ago, I sat through the lead-up announcement at the gala dinner secretly directing all my energies at losing. In the gale of applause greeting my rival's triumph, my friends mistook my excited cry of "fantastic!" for something else beginning with "f". "Never mind," they consoled me and that was the mortification of losing, being pitied. I hadn't wanted to make a speech, so the disappointment was mixed with reprieve, and chagrin that no one understood this. Failing is survivable: being seen to fail is mortifying.With age, however, this self-consciousness too falls away. Who cares if I fail? Hundred to one any spectators have failed too and worse than I. In fact, some people rush to claim failure where it doesn't exist: marriages "fail" (they end), health "fails" (we get old and sick), athletes "fail" to secure a place on the team (someone else got it). I get to try for my licence again in eight weeks, eight weeks in which to improve and learn. That's what the test was for: to make sure I'm competent before I take a lethal machine to the roads. God bless that inspector, I say. God bless this morning's failure.And you know what? Once you've failed it's done. The worst has happened. And the sky didn't fall in, people didn't line the streets to mock and jeer, the cat still talks to you. Onwards!
© 2011 The Age
