Getting comfortable with failure - and the particular way I have been socialised to do it - has itself been the greater failure of my own life.

Do you remember that night we were out in the forest, four of us, and the rain was bucketing down and we’d retreated to the warmest corner of our wooden hut. Maybe we were drinking hot chocolate, and somebody asked what everyone’s greatest fear was? And you and I, right off the bat, we said ‘failure’. And the other two, just a second behind, said it was losing someone they loved.

A slight segue: to consider Taskmaster, one in the never ending series of lightweight comedy shows that people working the scene rotate through in Britain, like 8 of 10 Cats, Would I Lie to You, etc etc. Contestants (professional comedians, mostly) do tasks for points, including for bringing in their own prizes. Taskmaster has a range of recurring characters, one of which is Fred the Swede. In one series, contestants were asked to find out information from him - which included his greatest fear. Att misslyckas, he says.

Now look, I’m not on a TV show. But I still can’t help but point out that Fred the Swede is most famous (in the english-speaking world at least) for being, well, Fred the Swede, an infrequently recurring character on a ridiculous, existentially oblivious comedy show. And he’s most afraid, of all things, death and loss and taxes and being trapped alone in a room full of rats available to him as choices, of failure. I mean, what does that even mean? What project, what work are we so afraid of failing on?

Then I look, once I have that feeling of absurdity, at what the practical effects of that fear have been in my own life, and I reach a squiggly kind of shame feeling. Fear of failing has not made me more likely to try for things. Fear of failure has made me less likely to define what it is that I want to do, and then even when I know, it’s made me more likely to turn from it in resignation. Well, I can’t have that anyway. Better embrace feeling terrible about yourself instead.

Elsewhere on that same blog, TLP describes the same in more detail, ‘the desire to be something coupled with the terror of doing anything– which results in ambivalence and inertia camouflaged in a consumerist lifestyle full of meaningless choices’.

Didn’t I assume that just now, talking about Fred the Swede? That success for him must be to ‘be’ someone (who is famous), not to have done something - I walked right into it.

So critically important, now, to create some positive vision, which we really could fail to reach. Are we working to keep away ‘weariness, vice, and want’ in the world? Your kelpie might be scratching at the doors of your mind, but mine is weary from want of work.