Continuing our elaboration on William George Jordan’s brilliant book, “The Majesty of Calmness,” I would like to turn now to consider the nature of failure and success. To begin with, life is full of both, so you are wise to develop a strategy for the creative handling of either as a means of ensuring continual progress. You cannot expect to avoid failure in life, so the sooner you become accustomed to it and learn to make the best use of it, the better.

In my own experience I have found it useful to refrain from judging the outcomes of my endeavors as much as possible. There is always a great risk in taking a snapshot of life and criticizing the static view, for life is a flowing process, and what looks good now might not be helpful ten minutes from now. Conversely, what looks terrible in the moment might be revealed to be the best thing that could have happened to you several days later. Appearances can be deceiving.

When you judge something you lock it in, freeze it in time and space. The process doesn’t typically stop there, in fact, the next step is to coat it with layers of emotional lacquer. Every time you think of that thing you paint on another layer. It doesn’t take long before you no longer see the original event or situation, instead, all you see is what you want to see, which is painted on the outside as a result of your faithful yet likely distorted reproduction.

Judgment has the power of revising history for those who eat of its fruit. I’ve seen people turn what was the happiest time in their lives into a twisted and shadowy nightmare after the fact by virtue of a steady diet of judgment. I’ve also watched people convince themselves – this time through the rose-colored lens of judgment – that some earlier time was the best they ever had. “I wish I could go back to high school! Things were so much better then!” I wish I had a time machine for every time I heard that one.

The point I wish to make this morning is that you needn’t be so quick to judge. It has a stupefying effect, no matter how you swallow it. Let the factors in your life reveal themselves over time. Take the long view. Live, as they say, in the now, but resist the temptation to navigate your world through the eyes of a judge. You’ll likely misrule on that basis and fail to see that failure, in many cases, is often the genesis for a future success.

Here is what Mr. Jordan had to say about the tendency to judge failure, some 100 years ago:

“It ofttimes requires heroic courage to face fruitless effort, to take up the broken strands of a life-work, to look bravely toward the future, and proceed undaunted on our way. But what, to our eyes, may seem hopeless failure is often but the dawning of a greater success. It may contain in its debris the foundation material of a mighty purpose, or the revelation of new and higher possibilities.

Some years ago, it was proposed to send logs from Canada to New York, by a new method. The ingenious plan of Mr. Joggins was to bind great logs together by cables and iron girders and to tow the cargo as a raft. When the novel craft neared New York and success seemed assured, a terrible storm arose. In the fury of the tempest, the iron bands snapped like icicles and the angry waters scattered the logs far and wide. The chief of the Hydrographic Department at Washington heard of the failure of the experiment, and at once sent word to shipmasters the world over, urging them to watch carefully for these logs which he described; and to note the precise location of each in latitude and longitude and the time the observation was made.

Hundreds of captains, sailing over the waters of the earth, noted the logs, in the Atlantic Ocean, in the Mediterranean, in the South Seas―for into all waters did these venturesome ones travel. Hundreds of reports were made, covering a period of weeks and months. These observations were then carefully collated, systematized and tabulated, and discoveries were made as to the course of ocean currents that otherwise would have been impossible. The loss of the Joggins raft was not a real failure, for it led to one of the great discoveries in modern marine geography and navigation.“