We had been driven out of our house this past Saturday for showings, so one stop was at the library. Honestly, I don’t patronize the library much any more, the physical one at least. I get audiobooks and e-books, and I listen to podcasts and read political articles online. So my former at-least-once-a-week library habit has dwindled away to almost nothing. But we needed a place to hang out, so there we went. One of my favorite places at this branch is the nonfiction new book shelves at the top of the stairs. I couldn’t tell you how many great discoveries I’ve made there. Saturday was no exception; I picked this book off the shelf and sat down in one of the chairs upstairs, thinking that I’d read a chapter or two, and I was hooked. I ended up reading all but two chapters, which for me nowadays is kind of a record, and I made sure to read the conclusion.
I was reminded as I started this post of another book on failure and loss, Upside: The New Science of Post-Traumatic Growth, that I posted about back in August 2015. That book started out with the author’s description of his father’s time in a Nazi concentration camp, and how the affects had stayed with him, both for bad (trouble sleeping, hypervigilance) and the good (empathy, strength). This book starts out with a description of the author’s son losing a tennis match and then losing his temper. It’s much more focused on the mundane, although there are some severe traumas involved: Fay Vincent’s fall when he tried to climb out of a locked college dorm room that resulted in a broken back and the end of his active sports career (but he ended up becoming the commissioner of major league baseball), World Cup and Olympic soccer player Sara Hess’s devastating injuries on the field that forced her out of the game, Olympic skater Dan Jansen’s loss of his sister on the day he was competing in the 1988 Winter Olympics. Since Weinman is a sportswriter, he writes about . . . sports, most of the time. Me, I’m good at the sport of walking and that’s about it. But he makes his athletes supremely human, and he has a good mix of other figures who had lost and failed (they’re not the same thing): Susan Lucci of soap opera fame, Michael Dukakis of lost-election fame, plus lots of stories from his own life and those of his friends and family.
Trying to boil down the message of this book is hard, because any attempt to do so comes out sounding all Hallmark-card-y and obvious. It’s the old “pick yourself up and start over again’ message, but with added twists and faces. A big part of coming to terms with failure is the “what will people think?” problem. But, as the great physicist Richard Feynmann used to say, “What do you care what other people think?” (He wrote a book about it.) If you’re the football player who missed the field goal that would have won the playoff game that would have put you in the Super Bowl, it’s really hard to walk down the street knowing that everyone who recognizes you probably defines you by that miss. But you can’t do that.
You know what, folks? I’m flailing here. You just need to read this book. So much of its charm lies in the writing, which is superb. I’ll just say that I promise you’ll come out of reading even a few chapters with an added dose of grit. Give it a try and see.