So-Yeung: Failure

Saturday, February 11, 2012

A FEW things in life can hurt more than failing. It grips the gut in a slow, twisting motion that causes the eyes to water and the heart to pound. Failure can make grown men weep like teenaged girls, and make teenaged girls pound walls with their balled-up fists like grown men. And no matter how many times we go through failure, when we fail yet again, the pain is still as strong as it was the first time.

The results of a much-anticipated group competition for the school's annual speech fest just came out, and my advisory class had lost. And it hurt so bad tears were streaming down faces. It hurt so bad that even the eyes of our class clown, the guy who could laugh through a low math grade, misted over.

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Experience (and a lifetime of disappointments and dashed dreams) tell me that despite the agony, we cannot avoid failing. In fact, success, as any successful person will tell us, can never be attained without failures. Some people will even say that failures are part and parcel of success. As Honda car company's founder, Soichiro Honda, once said, "Success is 99 percent failure."

But. Quoting Soichiro Honda to a group of gutted, devastated and deflated students after they lost in a contest they prepared weeks for, sacrificed lunches and dinners for, and prayed so hard for would be utterly lame.

So there I stood inside the classroom, the adviser of Third Year Hope. I watched my students in their fairy-like costumes, weeping and struggling to understand why they did not even place third in the Speechfest Song Interpretative Dance contest, and I was hopelessly at a loss for words.

They had done everything they could to win. To be well-prepared, the choreographers Lian, Michelle and Janine had met as early as December 2011 just to conceptualize their dance. When classes resumed in January, they immediately jumped into completing their piece, using even their brief lunch breaks and the few hours at the end of each school day to practice.

Everyday up until the day of the competition, armchairs would be pushed to the side and the floor cleared, the classroom transformed into a dance studio where the participants went through the moves and created more choreography. The students set aside their differences, forgot about past hurts and ill-feelings in order to work with each other harmoniously.

The whole class supported each other. Even those who were not part of the dance helped. They assisted with the music and lights, gave constructive criticisms, and encouraged their classmates when energies flagged. In all my years as a teacher, I've never seen a group of people work so well together.

I wished there was something they did so clearly wrong that made them "deserve" to lose. Perhaps that they disobeyed the rules of the contest, disregarded their teachers' suggestions, did not practice properly, or fought. I wished they had bragged, taunted other students or forgot about making the dance an offering to God. I wished they had done something wrong so it will be easier to formulate a moral lesson, so I could say, "Well, if you had done this or that, you would have won."

But they had not. They had simply done their best... On the day of the competition, they danced with their hearts. They danced for God. And it was just not good enough.

Finally, after a few minutes of watching her classmates cry and comfort each other, the group's leader, Lian closed the door of our classroom and asked everyone to be quiet. With her face still wet with tears, she requested we bow our heads down in prayer. Lian thanked God for guiding the group throughout the practice, and for making them united. She thanked God for the opportunity to dance for Him. She thanked God because He knew their hearts and how they gave their all. She thanked God because even if they did not win the judges' votes, she knew that their greater purpose -- to glorify Him -- had been achieved, and for that they had already, and truly, won.

Pastor Arnel Tan always tells the congregation of Chinese Baptist Church that being a Christian does not guarantee a problem-less life. In fact the opposite might be true. God allows hardships to come our way, for it is in our times of need that we recognize God’s love and power more; it is in disappointments that we draw closer to God. Of course, failure will still hurt. Even as Lian and the rest of us said “Amen”, the pain of not winning what we yearned to achieve still stung. But the lesson had already begun to bloom in each of our hearts. Failure is part of success. That tiny lost during speech fest was what led us to another kind of victory, the kind that constitutes realizing what real success meant, recognizing what was really important, and treasuring what the experience had transformed our section to be.

"I love you," "You did a great job," we all began to say after Lian's prayer, as we hugged and kissed each other inside our classroom. And that's when it started to hurt less and less and less.

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Jocy L. So-Yeung dedicates this to the awesome Hopias of Davao Christian High School.