What does it mean to fail?

The piece below was written as the second in the series for my friend's website. Success? came before this one. As a postscript to this second piece, you should know that the friend I mention in it has since acquired a home that she is delighted to call her own. All is well that ends well.

“Remember: happiness is not dependent on who you are or what you have, it depends solely on what you think.”

Gautama Buddha

This week, a friend of mine put in an offer on a house. She has been house hunting for two years and had not seen anything that captivated her. Till now. A small Craftsman cottage called out to her from the moment she laid eyes on it. She sent me pictures, I thought it suited her perfectly.

The size, the style, even the way the current owner had decorated it, appealed to her sensibility. The book on the coffee table was the same one she was reading. And there was the wonderfully private and lush garden where she could plant vegetables and turn cartwheels all day long if she wanted (as she had done recently in her current garden, in an effort to teach my 8 year old how to turn cartwheels!).

When we wished her good luck after she put in her bid, she replied, “Oh, there is no question of luck, I am going to get it. I know it. That house and I are made for each other.”

Two days later she found out that she did not get it. Another buyer had outbid her. She was heartbroken. Had she failed? All she had been saving toward, working for, her dreams about living in a space meant just for her, gone.

What does it mean to fail? Should she have thought that she had failed, as most people would and indeed she did for a few days? Or did the Buddha really have something when he said that happiness depends on what you think? The world is full of wise saws and it is easy to ignore them sometimes as the feeling of failure or defeat overwhelms you.

But, she asked herself, what was different? Her life was still the same, it was just the house that was no longer a part of that picture. Indeed the house had never, until recently, been part of the picture. IF she had never chanced upon it, she would not today be feeling so sad, so cheated, so sadly altered.

And what she realized was that the only thing that had changed from the week before was in her head.

The power to be happy is in our heads. So is the power to be sad. The power to feel successful is there as is the power to feel failure.

So she did not succeed in getting her home. Now it was up to her to decide what to think. As she put it, she could say, “It’s all gone now and will never come back. Life sucks!”

Or she could hold on to hope: "I firmly believe that I will soon be living in a beautiful place of my own. I rejoice in imagining myself in that place, It gives me the greatest pleasure to make plans in my head about all the wonderful things I will do there... I have a beautiful dream and a belief that it is out there for me."

She chose the latter approach. This is gratifying for several reasons. First and foremost, I am glad for my friend that she is finding a positive way to approach her disappointment. Second, I am interested in how we all approach problems, obstacles, and perceived failures. I have tracked my evolution in this regard since I was a child. Crushing disappointment is followed by utter despair. Getting knocked down leads to lying winded on the floor. Being told I am not good at something in school makes me feel small and inconsequential.

Then, funny as it sounds, a best seller (among many other things) helps me change the way I look at failure and disappointment. Reading Gone With the Wind in my early teenage years, I saw Scarlett O’Hara not as an unscrupulous, mercenary go-getter who would not let anyone stand in her way but as a determined woman who would not let life get her down.

I was startled and amazed at her chutzpah throughout the novel but it was definitely the ending that left me breathless with admiration. Her world had ‘ended’ and the last person who loved her had finally abandoned her. Yet she could say (and I am paraphrasing here), “I’ll deal with it tomorrow, tomorrow is another day.”

“Wow!” I thought, “That is some kind of woman. That is some kind of optimism.”

Now I couldn’t be more different from Scarlett O’Hara but I do share her optimism. I have woken up nearly every day of my life feeling that it was a beautiful, new day and that good things were going to happen. Even if I had gone to bed unhappy or troubled, by morning I was ready to tackle life again, hope filling my mind and heart.

For this, I have my mother to thank. She taught me never to go to bed angry, to always fall asleep thankful for my blessings, and to live each day as my last. Subconsciously I had learned Scarlett’s lesson about not letting anything get me down. Consciously I learned from my mother because I saw that she lived her life as she taught me to live it, loving what she did, loving the people around her, generously giving of herself, her time, her cooking, with no expectation of anything in return, a smile always on her lips, no matter what pain was in her heart.

I think that a positive attitude can go a very long way in keeping you healthy and sane. It works for me. What some might term failure, I term a challenge. Yes, of course, I am first disappointed by some downward turn of events: an article not getting picked up by a journal I pitched it to; only three students turning up to a cooking class; my publisher delaying the publication of my book for years.

Naturally there is often frustration and irritation during the process of coming to terms with, and then tackling, those obstacles. But there are opportunities too. I choose to focus on those, the proverbial looking on the bright side of things. I can rework the article and pitch it elsewhere. I get more time with my three students and can do a test run of a new class on the smaller group. When the book finally comes out, the sense of relief, elation and excitement are well worth the wait! So the rewards are sweeter for having faced those challenges and disappointments head on rather than letting them derail me.

Finally, I am interested in how mood affects one’s work. As a writer, of course, my mood affects what I write. This I have known every since the angst and melodrama of my teenage years and first loves. As a chef too, I see how my mood can travel from my head and heart to my fingers and from there into whatever I am cooking.

Luckily, because cooking soothes me so much, this transference only rarely has a negative effect. Nine days out of ten, my food tastes good because I cook it with love, dedication and a positive frame of mind (as for that tenth, I guess, everyone is allowed the day off!).

So the Buddha was right. It is not who you are or what you have that creates happiness, it is what you think. And yet one can also twist his words to take on new, positive meaning: If you think positively, you can indeed shape who you are and what you have in the best possible way.

Success?

This summer a friend told me she was starting up a website "that offers a glimpse into the minds and lives of people who are successfully living their dreams..." and asked me to be a contributing writer, sharing thoughts on how I deal with my various career choices and "grapple with things like [one's] own sense of perfectionism, [one's] definitions of success, and [one's] connection to what's important."

As a writer, it is tough for me to refuse any opportunity to write. What I loved about this request was that it made me focus inward more than I usually need to do in my writing. I really had to introspect and reflect to give her the first two pieces she had asked for, to launch the website with in August.

Unfortunately, late in the summer, my friend's plan was put on hold by a tragedy and she is not resuming work on the website for now. I wish her all the best for the next few months. She suggested I offer my articles elsewhere for publication. So I thought I would share them right here, on my blog. The first, which appears below, is about success. The second tackles the idea of failure and I will post it tomorrow.

Success? What is that?

I have never viewed my life or my future in terms of success or being successful. I have certainly never equated any notions of success with cold hard cash. For me, success has resulted from the pursuit of smaller goals that have evolved and altered over the course of my life.

What I wanted most out of life, from an early age, was happiness. The desire to be happy has always driven me, and thankfully I have had more than an adequate measure of it! Luckily, I realized early on that happiness was not something to wait or hope for, or to look forward to. Happiness is in the here and now. There are many ways to be happy, and to make oneself happy. The most important, I find, is to be happy with myself and within myself and to greet each day as a new beginning.

The great film director, Ingmar Bergman said in Bergman Island, a 2006 documentary of his life and work, “The demons don't like fresh air. What they like best is if you stay in bed with cold feet. I always go for a walk after breakfast." I agree. I like to wake up happy and ready to go.

In my mind there is a critical connection between happiness and success. When I was 8, success was the joy of being given another mystery storybook as a gift. When I was 12, it was discovering that I enjoyed writing and wanted to be a writer when I grew up. At 16, success and happiness meant knowing that the man I was in love with reciprocated my feelings. At 20, it meant getting into the journalism school of my choice, then getting to work as a reporter at a reputed newspaper. When I was 26, it was the opportunity to write a book. By the time I was 33, it was getting pregnant when the ringing of my body clock had become most insistent. Three years ago, it was getting my green card approval so I could finally start Un-Curry.

Success is the feeling of satisfaction and relief when after five years of hard work my cookbook was finally published last year. But it is also the look of enchantment on my daughter’s face when I read her a story; the reaction of a friend when I offer a shoulder to lean on; my husband’s delight when I cook his favorite meal.

Perhaps my ideas of ‘success’ come from growing up in a family where money was never very high on the list of priorities. Learning, friendship, caring and compassion were. My parents are both professors of English literature. They traveled a lot for pleasure and work and made sure never to leave my brother and me behind. Growing up, I lived in different parts of Asia, Europe and the United Kingdom. I often think of Rudyard Kipling’s famous, frequently misquoted line, “East is east and west is west and n’er the twain shall meet...” in terms of myself because in my life, east and west have met, providing me a unique insider-outsider perspective to the world’s politics, writing, culture and foods.

Part of the striving for success -- of any kind -- is to work hard, study, learn skills and practice them ad nauseam till you have the necessary experience and expertise. It is never too late to start. As a writer, I often meet people who tell me they wish they could write; that they cannot write well but would love to; that they have stories to tell but no skill with which to tell them. I tell them to just start. “Do it regularly. The skills will come, the experience will build, before you know it, you will BE a writer.”

That applies to almost anything you set your mind to doing. Cooking, skiing, mathematics, surfing. I believe that if we and the people around us don’t limit us, most of us can acquire a variety of skills (think Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences) and pursue several professions successfully throughout the course of our lives. This is what I, as an immigrant to the USA, admire so much about Americans. They pick themselves up from misfortune and start over at any age, acquiring new knowledge and skills as needed and rebuilding their lives with determination and energy! This way of approaching life, as a constantly shifting but achievable set of goals and aspirations rather than one distant star to aspire to, is admirable.

What is also important to remember and what I, as a perfectionist, had to teach myself, is that, while striving for your goals, you also need the ability to let go and to go with the flow. I have motherhood to thank for helping me acquire this.

As many of you know, the only thing that is predictable about parenthood is its unpredictability. Nine years ago, with the birth of my daughter, I stopped being the A-type, driven journalist who had to do everything -- from writing and editing to house cleaning, cooking and entertaining -- excellently or feel she had failed.

The first thing I let go of after my daughter’s birth was the dish washing! That might sound trivial but for someone used to cleaning her home, refrigerator included, once a week from top to bottom, it was very difficult to see dishes piled up in the sink. Did it really matter though? It was an education not just in understanding the pitfalls of perfectionism but also in prioritizing. Dishes or daughter? Daughter! Cleaning or cooing to my baby? Definitely cooing!

And going with the flow? Strolling in our neighborhood with my toddler was good training. A solo walk might take me 15 minutes. With a child meandering, squatting to observe some ants, pick up fall leaves, stare at birds flying overhead or smile at other walkers, we might be out for a good hour, no matter what deadlines awaited me at home. Not only did I learn to go with the flow, I remembered the importance of stopping to “stand and stare.”

These abilities have since come in handy. At Un-Curry, my catering company and cooking school, I have to deal with clients, plan menus, shop, prep, cook, teach, cater parties for 8-125 guests, with precision, efficiency and passion. I have to know where to spend my time and where to cut my efforts short. I have to put aside my own opinions sometimes and go with the flow of my clients’ predilections, the limitations of ingredients and kitchens.

At this point, you might be asking, how did a journalist get into teaching Indian cooking classes and catering home cooked, regional Indian food? I have been fascinated by food for as long as I can remember. Many of my sharpest memories are connected with it. As a very young child in Maharashtra (one of India’s largest states), however, I was a fussy eater and had no interest in cooking. My mother and grandmothers were superb cooks and came from a culture where one cooked every day and rarely, if ever, went out to eat. My mother’s family also entertained lavishly and frequently. I was constantly inhaling the aromas of their cooking -- chicken drenched in cilantro pesto, guava fudge, tomato jam, garlicky brown lentils -- and I was encouraged to ‘taste’.

My food history is not typically Marathi (of my state). I spent my childhood in Canada, Wales and different parts of India, moving every few years, and eating a variety of foods that my mother liked to experiment with: it might be chana masala one day, pork chops with mushrooms in wine the next, falafel the third. This was in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s when exposure to international cuisines was not what it is today.

Perhaps because eating the traditional food of my ancestors was a rare treat in my mother’s international kitchen, as I grew older I cultivated a great taste for the food of my state. In my early 20s, I wanted to learn more about it and so began my forays into the world of cooking. Marathi food – with its flavors of coconut, rice, jaggery (raw sugar), mango, and kokum (Garcinia indica); its characteristic seasonings of mustard seed-turmeric-asafetida, or ghee and cumin seed; and its delicate crunch of stir fried vegetables – was a means for me to reconnect with my past, to delve into my ancestry. It also has become the way to my future.