I wrote a rather upbeat post several days ago about dealing with failure and disappointment. It’s become clear to me the the interim that my go-to strategy — getting back to work — is good in some respects but completely inadequate in others. Getting back to work helps one keep moving forward, which is good. But it does very little to heal wounds. As readers of that earlier post will recall, the post was inspired by a professional failure: a rotten performance at a fly-out. Since then, and since my initial post, I’ve been struggling with predictable emotions: frustration, self-directed anger, etc. Getting back to work helped me…get back to work — but it did nothing for the emotions I was struggling to conceal. Then, just now, as I was upset at myself for dealing with my emotions rather poorly, I enjoyed an unexpected stroke of good fortune. I don’t ordinarily listen to classical music, but I was out walking the dog and “Clair de Lune” came on Pandora on my IPhone. It just happened to be the song that played just over a year ago as my (now-)wife walked down the aisle on the best day of my life. Then and there it hit me like a ton of bricks. There is a simple and easy way to deal with professional disappointment: realize that your career, as important as it may be to you, should pale in importance to other, far more important things. Things like being good to people, and appreciating them. Getting back to work may be good for the career, but as Kant once said the trick is not in being happy (though that is quite a trick in itself); the trick is to deserve it. I realize this is a sappy, cliched message. Whatever. It’s true.
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3 responses to “On Doing a Better Job of Keeping One’s Head Up”
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Hi Marcus,
In trying times like yours, perhaps it would help to read some Stoic or Buddhist philosophy. Seneca, for example, can offer some strategies for engaging with our (intellectually unendorsed) emotional responses in an intelligent way while encouraging us to to be realistic about the limits that most of us face when it comes to emotional self-governance.
These texts can also encourage us to take an intellectual interest in our responses to the situation, and, arguably, taking up that sort of perspective can undercut or mitigate the forms of identification with emotional responses that lead to avoidable misery.
In a similar vein, I find solace in poems that focus on mortality and which help us take up a detached perspective. Here is one of my favorites in that vein:
This Pleasing Anxious Being
by Richard Wilbur
I
In no time you are back where safety was,
Spying upon the lambent table where
Good family faces drink the candlelight
As in a manger scene by de La Tour.
Father has finished carving at the sideboard
And Mother’s hand has touched a little bell,
So that, beside her chair, Roberta looms
With serving bowls of yams and succotash.
When will they speak, or stir? They wait for you
To recollect that, while it lived, the past
Was a rushed present, fretful and unsure.
The muffled clash of silverware begins,
With ghosts of gesture, with a laugh retrieved,
And the warm, edgy voices you would hear:
Rest for a moment in that resonance.
But see your small feet kicking under the table,
Fiercely impatient to be off and play.
II
The shadow of whoever took the picture
Reaches like Azrael’s across the sand
Toward grownups blithe in black-and-white, encamped
Where surf behind them floods a rocky cove.
They turn with wincing smiles, shielding their eyes
Against the sunlight and the future’s glare,
Which notes their bathing caps, their quaint maillots,
The wicker picnic hamper then in style,
And will convict them of mortality.
Two boys, however, do not plead with time,
Distracted as they are by what?–perhaps
a whacking flash of gull wings overhead–
While off to one side, with his back to us,
A painter, perched before his easel, seeing
The marbled surges come to various ruin,
Seeks out of all those waves to build a wave
That shall in blue summation break forever.
III
Wild, lashing snow, which thumps against the windshield
Like earth tossed down upon a coffin lid,
Half clogs the wipers, and our Buick yaws
On the black roads of 1928.
Father is driving, Mother, leaning out,
Tracks with her flashlight beam the pavement’s edge,
And we must weather hours more of storm
To be in Baltimore for Christmastime.
Of the two children in the back seat, safe
Beneath a lap robe, soothed by jingling chains
And by their parents’ pluck and gaiety,
One is asleep. The other’s half-closed eyes
Make out at times the dark hood of the car
Plowing the eddied flakes, and might foresee
The steady chugging of a landing craft
Through morning mist to the bombarded shore,
Or a deft prow that dances through the rocks
In the white water of the Allagash,
Or, in good time, the bedstead at whose foot
The world will swim and flicker and be gone. -
Thanks for this, Brad, particularly the poem. I’ve never read any Seneca. I’ll give it a shot.
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This is a great post, and a great blog. As a junior faculty member, I greatly appreciate the very idea of the blog and I think it is coming along wonderfully.
Leave a Reply to Brad CokeletCancel reply