Dar Al-Hayat, Lebanon
May 2 2010
If You Fail, You Fail Alone
Sun, 02 May 2010
Jihad el-Khazen
Everyone wants to succeed. However, I discovered through personal
experience and painstaking observation that success is overrated or
undeservedly glorified.
If you succeed, you pay more taxes, your relatives increase in number,
you succumb to temptations that contradict health, ethics and religion
` but which are otherwise only available to wealthy people. You fear
thieves, you worry about your health and you stop eating what you
like, your wife becomes more demanding, you become concerned about
your children being influenced by bad company and drugs, the house’s
fence becomes higher (perhaps with some barbwire on top too), and you
install cameras on the fence, the house’s gates and the back entrance.
However, if you fail, you fail alone, and people leave you be.
I am writing at the backdrop of a gathering I had with some friends in
London, in which we gossiped about some other friends who were abroad,
and went over our lifetimes together, and over who succeeded and who
failed.
Every Arab who is not a doctor or an engineer is supposedly a failure.
Since I was a teenager, and till today, the measure of success is
entering medical school or engineering school. However, I was never
fit for either and claimed that I did not want to enter them at any
rate, because my cousin was a doctor while my other cousins are
engineers, and that this was more than enough in one family. Also, I
said that the majority of engineering students at the American
University in Beirut were Armenian, and that I had so many Armenian
friends that I did not need any more.
Of course, I am justifying here my personal failure and the family’s
disappointment in its son who did not graduate as a doctor or an
engineer. However, my excuse was exposed and not accepted by my
friends, and one of them criticized me and claimed that I dishearten
the nation’s resolve with my constant criticism and talk about the
failures of the Arabs and Muslims, whether they try or not.
I do not think that the nation needs any further disheartening from me
for it to fail, because failure has become a part of its air, water,
flesh and blood, just like avarice became a second nature to the
residents of Mrou. Even the rooster there, as Al-Jahiz claimed, would
pick grains and compete with hens in eating them, instead of offering
those grains to the chicken like roosters do everywhere else.
Ever since Tariq bin Ziyad first crossed the sea to Andalusia in 91 AH
(711 AD), we have been losing the capital that we built in less than
one hundred years after the message and the conquests. For the
reader’s information, the same small island, on which Tariq and his
men landed off the coast of Iberia has been devoured by the Sea, and
it no longer exists today. Then Andalusia was lost along with
everything else in 1300 years of our ongoing downfall.
At any rate, general failure, or the failure of the nation, did not
help it relax. On the contrary, it made usurpers and both close and
faraway nations covet it.
But today, I want to talk about individual failure, which I find
better than success. In fact, I am saying nothing new here, as there
is a popular saying in the Levant [which loosely translated as]: no
money, no problems.
I know a story of relevance about a woman who was on her way home from
shopping. She came across a homeless man who asked her for some money.
She said that she is afraid he might spend it on spirits, but he said
that he does not drink. She then said that he might spend it shopping
but again, he answered that he has not been to a store in years. She
then said that he might spend it on grooming and accessorizing, to
which he answered that these things are the last things on his mind.
At this point, the woman asked the homeless man to go with her and
have dinner with her and her husband at their home. He said that he
looks terrible and his smell is foul. She answered: I want my husband
to see what someone who does not spend all their money on spirits,
shopping and make-up looks like.
After the gathering with my friends, I compared between success and
failure, the advantage of the one over the other, and whether I should
write about this subject. I would have perhaps refrained from doing
so, had it not been for the fact that I read the New Yorker magazine.
I usually start from the beginning with the small snippets about
Broadway shows. The name of one play caught my attention, which was
`The Success of Failure (or, the Failure of Success)’, written by
Cynthia Hopkins, and this play was the last instalment in a trilogy
also written by her.
I inevitably know a little about Miss Hopkins as she is a singer,
songwriter, dancer, actress and playwright. Yet, she complains about
failure, although if she succeeds in only one of those careers that
would be enough, let alone the fact that she made it in Broadway,
which means that she is already a resounding success. I read that she
complained that her alcoholism in her twenties meant that large chunks
of her memories are missing, and that she misses being young and wild.
Come visit us, miss, and you will be up to your ears in both youthful
and old wildness.
ndah/136937