Glorious Failure

You do not see
the 47 failed pictures,
the twelve failed poems,
the stories balled up and tossed
that litter my study floor.

You do not see the glorious failures,
one after another
in a comet’s trail of misadventures,
far more necessary,
far more important
than these few glimpses
of fleeting perfection.

About this poem

I took 47, (yep, counted them) shots trying to get the one shot I wanted. Playing with exposures. Fiddling with shutter speeds. Moving the camera this way and that as the shutter grabbed the night’s light.  46 of them were all wrong. This one…. just what I wanted. (We won’t debate whether it’s any good, but it IS what I was going for.).

I fail more now than I ever did when I was younger. And I am OK with that, because I have finally learned that failure is often the path to great and wonderful things. And why settle for anything less than great and wonderful?

John Maxwell has a phrase I like: “Fall Forward”. Fail all you like, but always use the failure to move forward. Onward! (Stumbling as he speaks)

Tom