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Failure IS an Option
One of the most exciting days of my life was the first day of school at Tisch School of the Arts (part of NYU). I’d been accepted at the age of fifty, to their graduate program in Musical Theatre Writing. I was one of the twenty-eight much younger students there.
My young adulthood had been kidnapped by a very early marriage that lasted eighteen years. My education was cobbled together with a GED (at seventeen), and then a bachelor’s degree in Applied Behavioral Science (at forty-three).
And now, I’d been accepted to a school I considered Mecca. Mount Olympus. NYU.
I was beyond myself with excitement at this second chance.
On the first day of school, we sat in a circle. As an ice-breaker, the game was: “Tell the group something you want them to know about you; and then tell them something you don’t want them to know.”
I wanted them to know I was a Buddhist.
I didn’t want them to know how much I suck at it.
This got an appreciative laugh.
But all these years later (I’m sixty-five now), I realize what an accurate picture I’d given them.
Doing anything with your whole heart means developing a tolerance for failing at it. That…
