If “nothing succeeds like success,” as the old adage tells us, then it stands to reason that “nothing fails like failure.” Makes sense, doesn’t it? If people can have a successful streak (and I’ve known a few who virtually went from nursery school to nursing home on one great big long one), people can also have a spell of bad luck that pretty much lasts a lifetime. I’ve known quite a few of them, too.
It seems that you make one wrong move or one bad decision and just like in checkers or chess, you’re either set up for victory – or doomed to defeat (barring a miraculous reversal or extraordinary piece of luck, which 9 times out of 10 doesn’t happen except in those “heartwarming” and “uplifting” made-for-TV Hallmark movies.)
So, how does the trolley of life go off the tracks, never to get back on them again? Pretty easily, it appears. Frequently, it starts with influences we have no control over — and by the time we realize how they’ve limited our opportunities and affected our choices, it’s too late. An excerpt from my novel-in-progress describes the process:
Camden Fell’s life has been one long series of mistakes… He was born to the wrong parents. They possessed the social graces of people raised by wolves. They christened him after a rundown, crime-riddled city in New Jersey, although they claimed it was an ancestral name. Ancestors? Camden thinks. This was a couple with no friends; even their forbears would disavow any connection to them in eternity.
Despite a middle-class income, his parents bought thrift shop clothes. They resembled refugees from a war-ravaged country and dressed him similarly. They ate day-old bread and green-tinged, discount beef. When they took the rare vacation, they traveled by Greyhound bus.
They enrolled him in the wrong school because a stranger in the supermarket checkout line recommended it to his mother. Westerhazy Academy was a holding tank for the supercilious offspring of flash-in-the-pan celebrities, one-hit-wonders and has-beens. It was also unaccredited, which ended his dream of going to Harvard. He attended a second-rate college and a graduate school nobody had ever heard of. As if this wasn’t inauspicious enough, he married the wrong woman.
Since then, he’s wasted twenty-five years as the ubiquitous middle manager who gets downsized — five times so far, and he has no doubt it will happen five more before he retires and discovers the government has run out of money for social security.
Is it too late for 50-year-old Camden Fell to get his life back on track again? Realistically speaking, yes. Unless he wins the lottery or divorces his first wife and attaches himself to an heiress who has very poor taste in men, he’ll spend his retirement years pinching pennies with a woman he shouldn’t have married.
Can he be happy anyway? Maybe, if he can be philosophical about his disappointments and mistakes, appreciative of whatever he does have and find other avenues of fulfillment for himself. But that’s a tall order for my fictional character…and for non-fictional people, too. Failure, particularly on a grand scale spanning several decades of lifetime, is a difficult thing to cope with. It isn’t made any easier by a society that is obsessed with conspicuous, materialistic and aggressive success.
There’s another old saying that tell us that when you’re down on your luck, you find out who your real friends are. That’s also a very true observation. Unfortunately, that’s when a person is most likely to discover that the ability to choose the right friends is yet one more personal failure to add to the ever-growing list.
Ironically, for so many of us, by the time we figure out how to make the right moves and ace the challenges, we’re just around the corner from riding off into that final sunset. A very saintly and rather mystical friend of mine was fond of saying, “Life is a cosmic joke — and the joke’s on us.” I guess the only answer, whether we’re a winner or a loser, is to learn to laugh.
–phoebe kate
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