Tuesdays are always one of the days in the week to which Meg and I particularly look forward as it is one of the days of the week when we meet up with our friends in the Waitrose cafeteria. Once we return, we also have a 'sit' service from the care agency which was originally designed for me to attend my Pilates class. In practice, I have not managed to attend these sessions for some weeks now which does not trouble me as greatly as might be imagined as pushing Meg in her wheelchair up and down the hill practically every day of the week is giving me some exercise as well as the fresh air. In practice, I use the sit session to make a visit into town to buy some of the things such as toiletries that are not necessarily readily available when I do my grocery shipping each Thursday.
Whilst watching the Paralympic athletes, I am quite interested in how they manage to cope with failure. Whilst the gold medals are celebrated, sometimes an athlete makes a bad mistake such as the cyclist who crashed out in her individual sprint in the Velodrome where she was tipped for a silver or even a gold medal. Kadeena Cox had missed out on the first gold of the Games when she crashed on the first corner of the C4-5 500m time trial on Thursday, having made a bad start, then slipping while trying to correct herself. The 33-year-old struggled with a calf injury, an eating disorder and a relapse in her multiple sclerosis in the build-up to this event, but overcame all that - plus her Thursday mishap - to claim a fifth Paralympic gold. Cox admitted she had struggled badly with her mental health after the incident and was nearly crying before going to the start line, but was helped through it by her sprint team-mates.
On a personal level, I have had occasion to wonder how to cope with failure - or at least the lack of success on the first attempt. I have always had a fairly successful academic career and have never really had to cope with outright failure or even a relative failure. But after I submitted my PhD way back in 1997 there was a waiting period of some three months which was the time given to the external examiners to read and assess the PhD. At the time, we lived just over a mile away from the Scraptoft Campus of Leicester Polytechnic and I used to walk to work each day in order to give myself some daily exercise, although I did use the car if I had masses of student work to carry. Whilst I was walking each day, I had plenty of time to contemplate how I would cope with failure because I had not had much experience of failure in my life to date. There was a much younger but brilliant postgraduate student with whom I was a conference buddy as we went on conference trips where we could to build up our contacts and publishing record. He was very much an old head on young shoulders and he gave me the advice, which was timely, to prepare myself psychologically to be asked to revise or rewrite a chapter. This is actually what did occur as the Chief External Examiner asked why I had not include '4th generation evaluative methodologies' in my thesis which was a concept of which I was completely ignorant (as, incidentally, were the other two examiners of the thesis) So I undertook another increment of fieldwork, added the results into a chapter including, of course the aforementioned 4th generation evaluative methodologies, submitted the revised version of the thesis and was eventually rewarded with success. A month or so later, I was in contact with a fellow academic who worked at the University of Birmingham and who, like myself, had written and submitted her own PhD when we were both about the same age (in our 50's) She told me that did I not realise that my Chief External Examiner who we both knew well from the conference circuits always, always asked his students to go the 'extra mile' and to undertake some further work to refine the thesis they had submitted. Knowing this, I did not at the time feel that my initial setback was a 'failure' as such but was a lack of immediate success which is not quite the same thing. However, I have known at least a couple of close colleagues who had similarly not met with immediate success but who had become thoroughly disheartened and had not proceeded further with their PhD thus ending up with nothing. But athletes themselves know that they cannot win every race every time and there may be good reasons for a lack of success on the day. For example, they may know that they are carrying a niggling injury or they might have got their tactics for the race all wrong and end up being 'boxed in' which is a constant danger in middle distance races. No doubt, they learn from these experiences and know that if they are beaten by a bitter rival in one particular encounter, the positions might be reversed at some point in the future. Moving to the sphere of politics, the controversial right wing Tory MP, Enoch Powell, once remarked that 'all political careers end in failure' Actually this is a précis of what he actually said which was somewhat more verbose than this as follows: ‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’ But when the failures do come, they are often in quite dramatic circumstances as we saw when Margaret Thatcher failed to secure enough votes from the Tory parliamentary party to carry on as Prime Minister and eventually had to be told by her fellow cabinet members that she had come to the end of the road. Actually, it is said that her husband Denis Thatcher, who was quite a sage politician in his own right but who rather like to be portrayed as some kind of buffoon, told her in their Downing Street flat 'C'mon on, Maggie - you know that the game's up' and we all can remember Margaret Thatcher leaving Downing Street with a tear in her eye. To conclude this point, I still think it is an interesting point how as individuals we cope with failure (or with evident lack of success). It is undoubtedly true that this can act as a spur to redouble one's effort to succeed in the future and equally the case that some find they are completely disheartened. I suppose most of us oscillate between these two extremes.
© Mike Hart [2024]