sailure = successful failure

See also dailure (dazzling failure), and the converse concept from a recent missive, cictory (catastrophic victory).

I try to be topical here. But I don’t always succeed. I guess I’m being topical in the sense that some newords have kind of amorphous application, to various points in life and/or history. Yes I’m that delusional and self-aggrandizing. No I don’t really think that. ;)

Maybe the political root canal just past- or possibly just begun? – which we call an election is an example. If you’re of my political persuasion, we snatched defeat in 2010 from the jaws of resounding victory in 2008. And yet, in the mud of defeat potentially sprout the seeds of victory, if the tea party is actually held to some standard of accountability and their emperor’s clothes are exposed for the tattered red white and blue fakery they really are?

That’s about as topical as I can get right now. On a more personal level I speak as someone who has had two marriages end, and whose relationship from college has begun anew, right here in midlife. Also as someone who believes in the chrysalis concept of human life, that the chrysalis we develop in can last through adolescence or it can last through a generation or two of one life. It all depends. There are no rules. Was it a failure not to stay married? Or not to have stayed from college til now with the person who it turns out is the one I want to spend the rest of my life with? Is it that what failed way back then can therefore succeed now?  Or that it’s success to transition from a relationship that isn’t working to one that wasn’t ready to work all those years ago? What is success and what is failure? And is my asking this just another manifestation of the unmooring effect of midlife? Continue reading →