Anatomy of Failure

Tell me, what do you do in the mornings? There could be a lot of things I suppose. You could embrace the daily regimen of going to work taking the same route, the same train, facing the same faces. You could worry about renewing your monthly rail pass or filling petrol in the car since it’s already been seven days since the last time. Your half eaten apple and hastily left tea cup in the sink. Your ransacked sock drawer and careless creases on ironed shirts you rejected on the basis of superstition and colour. The quick security frisk at the metro station, the sound of radio and your nonchalance towards the enthused voice of an RJ. The same songs and the same radio spots that take you to your work place. Tell me. Do you find a sense of irony in wanting to run away from an everyday, without a sense of awareness to where?

Failure is an absence of a sense of awareness. It is a promise of something imagined and a confidence of its promised comfort. How much of that is ahead of you, a little out of reach, and how much of it never really existed, is something you would know only with the passage of time. Failure is a passage of time. The realization of what unfolded during the passing of that time, a sense of disillusionment, a sense of longing, a sense of palpitation that embraces you as you begin the day.

Any change that we forcefully want to bring about in our life out of sheer desperation can disperse in a hundred different ways. Like light reflecting on a prism, it would scatter around the walls of your life while you would sit in the middle and try and gauge. There go the yellow ones, there the green, violet and red. There are so many impossible possibilities that have been brought about now. It’s like a painter watching a beautiful painting from a distance and taking every passing second to realise his utter inability to recreate that. Time slows down, when you analyse your shortcoming.

Failure is the slowing down of time. The universe gets stretched like a trampoline and your dreams are but jesters bouncing off it in hilarious acrobatics. Someone, somewhere, beyond your myopic tunnel of vision, is laughing. When mornings transform to afternoons and then mingle with evenings as you stare at changing colors of the clouds’ outlines, that is when the universe stretches. That is when your watch tells short stories in episodes, making every minute into Odysseys. Epics are written through sounds of ceiling fans, lifetime is passed through sun rays on mosaic floors, memories are created to fill the long gaps between two heart beats.

Failure breeds patience. Not as virtue or vice, but as a defence mechanism to cope with reality. Patience is what you use to protect yourself from compassionate advice on self-belief and strength. Patience is what wards off salutations. It is what creates the am doing fine to every how are you doing; and I will try and make it to every let’s catch up this evening. Patience is what helps keep friends at bay. It is what fills up the savings accounts in the resounding absence of currency. Patience is what makes you turn your face towards the computer screen to avoid the helpless faces of those who truly care. Patience is what saves you from those who truly care.

Failure is when patience runs out. It is the art of living through suffocation. Like a marooned astronaut in an almost inhabitable planet, you breathe in short bursts. With time, you learn to breathe slowly. Failure teaches you to breathe slowly. It is when you get out of breath, staring into a nothingness waiting for dusk to come, so you can hide under the comfort of its darkness. With time you learn to breathe with the mouth open. As you pant, you stare at the space waiting for a ship to rescue you. Failure is what puts you to sleep promising dreams of spaceships with oxygen. And then failure is what teaches you to wake up in the morning and open your mouth to breathe.

Tell me, what do you do in the mornings. Await serendipity?

Fair enough.