On the value of mistakes and ‘failures’

Last weekend some neighbors came wandering out back while a friend and I were sitting in the carporch having a visit, as my family would say. We were in the hanging chairs, naturally, which are comfy and well-shaded. C and D took up the other two — C in the stiff, upright chair against the wall, well under the roof, and D in the Adirondack chair at the edge of the roofline. As we sat there talking, in the early afternoon of a bright sunny day, I realized D was fully enclosed in the shade of the fledgling birch tree, and I smiled the biggest inward smile at the quiet triumph of that. To have a place for friends to sit and hang out, sheltered from the sun (or even rain) is one of the core goals of this whole garden project, and it’s working.

Is there room for improvement, even in that one regard, and lots more to do? Blessedly, yes. There will be even more shade eventually. A more comfortable chair against the wall. Additional spots to sit and eat — enough seating to have a little dinner party one day. I’ll get used to the idea that it’s pleasant and comfortable enough that people who pop by might want to stay awhile, and I’ll offer them my seat! I get things right and I get things wrong. I observe and learn and improve. (At least, I endeavor to.) In life, and in the garden.

When I wrote about my first-year dahlia failure the other day, as noted, a lot of people assumed I was taking it hard that my tubers hadn’t (yet) produced. In the short history of this blog so far, I may have posted more about my ‘failures’ than I have my successes, and that’s likely to be true for a bit, so I thought I would share my thoughts on it, as it seems like an increasingly odd thing to do these days, publicly admit mistakes of any kind. 

For starters, whatever successes I have with this garden will take time to bear out. I’ll be more than happy to share them as they manifest — and they will! But I’ve spent a lot of time sharing my mistakes with people on the internet — most recently in the form of an 8-year knitting and slow-fashion blog* — and I love to do it because mistakes are how we learn. And we don’t only learn individually from our mistakes, we learn collectively. So much of what I know about knitting and sewing, and definitely about gardening, comes not only from making mistakes and learning how to correct for them, but also learning from other people’s experiences, including their mistakes.

Learning what not to do, or what to do next when something goes wrong, is every bit as important as learning what to do. And not all mistakes or failures — aka learning experiences — are even (or entirely) our fault. Take my dahlias, for instance. It’s possible I didn’t get great tubers, I don’t know; I definitely didn’t get optimal rain or temperature conditions; I didn’t spend a lot of time finding out what I might need to know about water levels or fertilizer needs. And so on. It was a combination of innocuous factors, controllable and uncontrollable, like most things are, and the only thing riding on it was whether I’d have homegrown dahlias for my table this month. The stakes were low. So I don’t take it personally and am entirely comfortable talking about it on the internet. 

In my view, mistakes are all fodder for improvement, and maybe I’ll share something that proves to be a resource or a lightbulb moment for someone else. Mistakes are also more interesting to me, honestly. The internet is full of people and imagery depicting seemingly effortless ‘perfection’ — designed more to give other people ‘aspirational’ FOMO than actual inspiration or intel — and that’s not what I’m here for. 

I am also a person who has battled the curse of perfectionism for much of my adult life, and you’ll hear me acknowledging when I’ve been hamstrung by it and when I’ve kept it in check. For me, the most important part of the dahlia story wasn’t that they didn’t produce, it was this line: “This was remarkably non-perfectionist behavior for me, buying tubers based on descriptions and hoping I would like what sprouted from them.” As much as I enjoy the research and planning, the tiny triumph of having bought those tubers on a whim and dropped them into the dirt, without any kind of grand plan or even color scheme in mind, was a moment of palpable success for me. Just like that shade on the Adirondack chair. 

For me, whatever the effort and the outcome, it’s all to the good. So please know that I will always offer up my successes big and small, alongside my mistakes and failures, and that I consider them all teachings from the universe that I’m happy to share, in the hope you might get something from them too.

*While I was typing this, I recalled that I wrote a little motivational speech on this same subject for that blog in 2016.