A Life’s Worth of Failure, an Abundance of Gratitude

By Karl Keating | The New Oxford Revies, July-August 2022

I came to hiking and backpacking late in life. I remember exactly when it was that I went on my first backpacking trip. It was in California’s Sierra Nevada, south of Mammoth Lakes. The first day I hiked to Duck Lake and camped there. The second day I hiked farther, to Purple Lake, and camped there. The third day I began to retrace my steps. Along the way, I met a ranger. We spoke for a few moments, and then she said, “I don’t know if I should tell you this. I don’t want to ruin the rest of your hike.”

“Well, now you’ve got me wondering,” I said. “So you may as well tell me.”

“New York’s Twin Towers have been destroyed.”

That first backpacking trip sticks in my memory for more than one reason, as do two preparatory day hikes I took in the months immediately prior.

In July 2001 I hiked up White Mountain. At 14,252 feet, it’s the third-tallest peak in California and, by general consensus, the easiest of the fourteeners to summit. But I didn’t find it easy. Once I passed 13,000 feet, my leg muscles turned to Jell-O. The farther I ascended, the more often I had to stop to catch my breath: every hundred paces, every fifty, every twenty. At length, I reached the summit, and, at length and thoroughly exhausted, I returned to the trailhead, where I said to myself, “This, by far, is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.”

I changed my mind a month later.

In August I did a day hike of Mt. Whitney. At 14,505 feet, it’s the tallest peak in the 48 contiguous states. The Mt. Whitney trail is half again as long as the White Mountain trail, and the elevation gain is twice as much.

I reached the summit later than I had hoped, but I reached it. On the way down, I passed Trail Crest, at 13,600 feet, and was about to enter the infamous 97 switchbacks. They take you, in a precipitous mile and a half, down 1,600 feet to Trail Camp, roughly the midpoint of the route.

At the top of the switchbacks, one of my toes began to bother me. I suspected a blister was in the works. I knew what I should do: sit down right there, take off my shoe and sock, examine the toe, and tape it up as necessary. “No,” I thought, “I’ll wait until I get to the relative comfort of Trail Camp.” It was a capital mistake.

When hiking, if your foot starts to go bad, your leg tries to compensate. The compensation isn’t always successful. Partway down the switchbacks, my knee went out. The pain was substantial, but worse was that I couldn’t bend my leg at all. I hobbled into Trail Camp, found a large granite slab to lie on, and, while watching the clouds go by, I contemplated what I should do.

At first I thought, “I’ll stay right here for the rest of the afternoon and tonight. My leg is bound to be better in the morning.” On reflection I thought, “No, I can’t do that. I’m a day hiker, not an overnight hiker. I have no tent, no sleeping pad, and no sleeping bag. In two hours the sun will set behind the surrounding mountains, and the temperature will plummet. I don’t have clothing warm enough for the night. I’ll lie awake the whole time, shivering, and I’ll greet the dawn in worse shape than I am now.”

I got up and, like Festus in Gunsmoke, dragged my bum leg behind me for the remaining six miles. Those six miles should have taken me fewer than three hours. They took me more than seven, and I arrived at the trailhead late at night.

My first ascent of Mt. Whitney was both a success and a failure. I would go on to summit another half dozen times — and fail to summit three other times. It is that first summit that sticks in my mind, not so much because it was the first time I reached the peak but because that hike has become emblematic of my life. It’s been a life with several — mostly undeserved — successes, but the failures have predominated and are more representative than the successes.

In this I am like others. How should we react to such a realization? What should our attitude be toward failure? I propose that our attitude should be one of gratitude, as strange as that may seem.

I have a favorite line from Pope Leo XIII. It’s from Rerum Novarum (1891), the first of the social encyclicals. Nearly every pope since his time has written one or more social encyclicals. The line I remember isn’t quite as Leo wrote it. Often we remember lines a little differently from the way they actually were written or spoken. This is the way the line has settled in my mind: “There is nothing so salutary as to view the world as it really is.” I have drawn my own corollary: “There is nothing so salutary as to view ourselves as we really are.”

It isn’t easy to view ourselves as we really are, but it becomes easier with age. Looking back from my present vantage point — I have passed the biblical three score and ten — I can appreciate and weigh things in my life in a way I couldn’t ten or even five years ago. I can view my life at something like arm’s length, with a clarity I didn’t enjoy before. The view isn’t particularly inspiring.

I can hardly think of a department of life in which I have succeeded more often than I have failed: as a son, brother, husband, or father; as a friend, neighbor, or mere acquaintance; as an employer, employee, or coworker; as a writer, editor, or publisher; as a speaker or a listener; as a believer or a pray-er. Take the last one as an example.

If there is a poetic phrase that applies to me, it’s from T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton.” It’s only five words: “Distracted from distraction by distraction.” I pray the Rosary every morning, but I wonder whether I ever have been able to pray it through without getting distracted. I suspect not. If I ever had prayed it through without distraction, I’d have been so startled that the event would have been etched in my memory indelibly.

It may be no surprise, then, that my reigning defect is procrastination. It is the only art I have perfected. I am perpetually busy, yet my to-do list reads almost the same today as it did last month — or last year. Because of procrastination, I have let many opportunities slip. Sometimes I recall the line Marlon Brando uttered in On the Waterfront: “I coulda been a contender.” So many times I could have done something useful, but I put it off and put it off until it was too late.

Seeking success (and so often failing to achieve it) is largely a “guy thing.” Men tend to strive for success; most women don’t. In most matters, women take the smarter route. They usually don’t think in terms of success. In most matters, men do. It’s in our nature. We exist, most of us, in competition, whether in athletics, at work, or in the innocent pleasures of daily life. We’re in competition with others — and even with ourselves.

Seeking success, we often fail, and the failures sting. We tend to put them out of our minds. The result is that the lesser number of successes seems to outweigh the greater number of failures. This is a form of unreality, and, in the long run, unreality isn’t satisfying.

We should try to understand our failures: why they occurred and how we can prevent ourselves from replicating them. If they are moral failures, we need to resolve them in the confessional. If they are failures of wisdom or knowledge, we need to study and reflect. If they are failures of ability, skill, or advancing age, we need to ameliorate them as we can. And if they are failures beyond our control, such as those caused by natural forces or by other people’s actions, we need to learn to assess them properly.

We ought to be, oddly enough, grateful for our failures. It’s easy to be grateful for successes, so it may seem counterintuitive to be grateful for failures. Who wants to fail? Who wants to rejoice in failure? Given our fallen nature, you might think failure not only should be shunned but put out of our minds entirely, as having nothing useful in it. But we can profit from failure, even while trying to avoid it.

In life we learn two ways: from positive instruction and from observing the mistakes of others — and our own. We learn more the second way than the first. We learn more by way of tears than by way of smiles. We ought to be grateful to learn this less enjoyable way. For some people, it may be the only way they learn.

I began with backpacking. Here I am, two decades beyond my first backpacking trip, still backpacking, but now with little success. Two years ago, on a failed hike (not feeling well, I turned around early), I passed along a fine but not spectacular alpine meadow. I stopped to catch my breath and take in the view. Then something happened that never had happened to me before.

It was as though I had been standing in the shallows of a calm lake when, suddenly and without warning, a great wave rose up and washed over me, not fearful but refreshing. As I looked across the meadow, a wave of gratitude washed over me. I don’t know what prompted it, but it was deep and wide and refreshing, and the sense of gratitude extended beyond my immediate surroundings.

It wasn’t so much a sense of gratitude for being there, at that meadow, but rather a sense of gratitude for just being — for existing, for living. I never felt quite like that before and don’t expect ever to feel like it again. It was a kind of grace.

None of us has a right to be. That we exist at all is a gift from God, who owes us nothing, not even our being. We can add nothing to His glory or happiness; not even if we were saints would we add anything. God doesn’t need us, but He made us anyway. This is a mystery. We should see it as a humbling one. In God’s eyes, we are, at once, both nothing and everything.

The British writer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) once said that a young man could make something of himself if he read five hours a day. I once could do that, when I was young, but I am young no longer and no longer have the stamina, either physical or mental (although, ironically, now that I’m retired, I have the time).

My largest collection of books consists of Johnsoniana. I have two bookcases devoted to works by him or about him or about his era. I have so many such books that I have to count Johnson as my favorite writer. Yet, when I page through his works, as a writer I become discouraged. If I am graced to live as long as he did, and if, between now and then, I can be as persistently productive a writer as in the distant past I occasionally was, I still would end up with only half as many volumes to my name, and their quality would be only a quarter of that of his works.

I appreciate Johnson not only for his writings but for his life — a life much different from mine, though I can see parallels. I share many of his foibles and weaknesses. Like him, I make self-improvement resolutions that go nowhere. Like him, I am afraid of dying ignorant. Like him, I feel that I have squandered my time and have ill-used the few talents given to me. Like him, I live by failure.

As an infant, Johnson was given out to a wet nurse. Like my not stopping to tend to my toe, it was a capital mistake, but an innocent one. From the wet nurse Johnson contracted scrofula, a disease that left him nearly blind in one eye, nearly deaf in one ear, and with deep scars, as though from smallpox, on his face and neck. Ever after he would suffer from nervous tics, wheezes, and groans. Fortunately for us, his mind was unaffected.

Johnson grew up in poverty. He was able to spend almost a year studying at Oxford, but only because of the generosity of a relative. When the stipend was gone, he returned to Lichfield, his birthplace, where his father ran a bookstore that didn’t bring in much money. Johnson worked there for a while and then struck out on his own.

He tried several times to start his own school. He failed each time. Until his dictionary brought him fame — but not yet much money — he was a failure in just about everything he did. Until middle age he literally wrote to live. Even when he became comfortable financially — after the king granted him a pension of £300 per year, a substantial sum in those days — he saw himself failing repeatedly, particularly in religious matters, but also in his writing life. He kept something like a diary, and in it, until the end of his life, he kept making plans for self-improvement: more regular attendance at church, more prayer, more study, more reading.

Johnson was charitable in a way few of us ever could be. In London one can visit his one-time home in Gough Square. It’s where he composed his dictionary, up on the third floor. It’s now a museum. He didn’t live there alone. He lived with an assortment of oddballs he took in.

There was Anna Williams, an elderly, crabby, and blind Welsh poet. There was Poll Carmichael, a former prostitute. There was Robert Levet, known as Dr. Levet, though he wasn’t a real doctor. (He once had visited France and observed physicians, and he came back to London where, when he wasn’t overdrinking, he tended to the needs of the poor, there being no real physicians for them.) Williams, Carmichael, Levet, and others Johnson housed didn’t get along, yet Johnson somehow put up with them.

Occasionally, we hear about, or even meet, someone who seems to go from success to success. He comes from a good family and is brought up well. He marries well. He excels as a father and in business. He may not be wealthy, but he is comfortable. He has a fine home and fine neighbors. He has innumerable friends and no enemies. He is respected and admired. His health is preternaturally good, even to the day of his death.

This is not the normal human condition. For most people, now and historically, a comment from Johnson applies: “In life there is much to be endured and little to be enjoyed.”

Johnson lived when London was the wealthiest city in the world. “When a man is tired of London,” he said, “he is tired of life.” But what a life it was, even in London! I have a book called Dr. Johnson’s London. It’s an appalling book. I don’t mean that it was appallingly written. It was written finely. No, it’s the London of Johnson’s time that we would consider appalling, by modern standards.

This was a time when there were no pain medications beyond the boiled bark of a few trees — and several stiff shots of whiskey. The first modern pain-relieving medication was aspirin, and it wasn’t developed until 1892, more than a century after Johnson’s time. You needed surgery? You could have it, but without anesthesia. You wanted fresh air? You couldn’t find it in London in those years. The city literally stank. Ancient Rome had a better sewer system than did 18th-century London.

You took your life in your hands — or, at least, you took your well-being in your hands — if you walked the streets early in the morning. That was when people tossed onto the streets, from their upper-story windows, what euphemistically was called night soil. If the stuff fell on you, how would you clean your woolen clothing? Dry cleaning didn’t yet exist.

As I said, Samuel Johnson has been a major influence on me, for multiple reasons. He has given me insights into the human condition I never would have reached on my own. Something similar can be said of a more ancient writer, St. Augustine. His most important book was The City of God, published in 426, four years before his death. He wrote it to defend the Church against the charge, levied by pagan writers, that the decline of Rome was the fault of Christianity. As it happened, Augustine’s own city, Hippo in North Africa, would fall to barbarians three years after his death.

Sometimes it takes centuries for civilizations to decline and fall. Literate people of the late fourth and early fifth centuries — both Christians and pagans — were aware that the Roman Empire was in decline, not just geographically or militarily but culturally and even morally, and they knew that the decline had been ongoing for generations. The old pagan virtues — honor, courage, magnanimity — were becoming scarce.

Most people who lived when Augustine wrote had little sense of a decline. Knowing no history, they assumed that things as they knew them were pretty much how things always had been. Few of them, except those who joined the Roman legions, ever traveled more than 20 miles from their homes in their entire lives. None of them went to school, there being no schools in our sense of the term. Almost all of them were illiterate. For generations they and their forebears had been unaware that their civilization was on a downward slope.

Rome fell in 476, when the last emperor, a young man with the ironic double name of Romulus Augustulus, was shoved aside by a barbarian general. His name was ironic because Romulus had been the name of the legendary founder of Rome, and Augustulus — which means Little Augustus — had been the name of the first and greatest of the Roman emperors. Romulus Augustulus is mentioned one or two times after his removal and then just disappears, like Roman civilization itself.

It’s much the same today. As late as 1946, in his famous “Iron Curtain Speech” at Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill could refer to “Christian civilization.” He was being generous, even at that late date. The descriptor has dropped out of usage in the past 76 years: our society no longer is Christian in any meaningful sense, even if Christians, most of them only nominal, still comprise the majority of its members. And there is reason to wonder whether the term civilization applies as much as it did three generations ago.

Most people today are oblivious to the fact of our civilization’s decline. We shouldn’t be surprised at that. It’s the standard state of things. People go about their day-to-day lives, worrying about this week’s paycheck, next week’s mortgage payment, next month’s un-looked-forward-to visit by unwelcome relatives. They don’t, in general, see the larger picture. That isn’t necessarily their fault. In the fourth chapter of the Book of Wisdom we are told, “The world looks on, uncomprehending.” That’s pretty much as it always has been. Most people are uncomprehending about many things.

In my childhood, it was easy to be a Catholic. We Catholics were respected. (We had Fulton Sheen on television, and he got higher ratings than Milton Berle!) The Church was respected, even when opposed. We had considerable influence over what was published in newspapers and magazines, what was shown in movie theaters, and what was within the legitimate bounds of public morality. Now we have almost no influence outside our own circles, and even inside, things have fallen apart.

Yet there is much that each of us can do, even if only privately and quietly. Recall the parable of the talents. The master was going on a long journey. He entrusted his property to his servants. To one he gave five talents, to another two, and to the third servant one. The first and second servants invested what they were given and doubled their holdings, while the third servant, out of fear of his master, buried his single talent in the ground. When the master returned, he praised the first two servants and condemned the third to the outer darkness.

A curious thing about this passage is the word talent. Unlike in most other languages, the translation of the underlying Greek has two meanings in English, not just one. The word still retains the ancient meaning of a large unit of money, but today the word primarily means a skill or an aptitude. It’s a happy chance that for us there is more meaning in the parable than there was for the original listeners.

We all are given talents, of various sorts — some people more than others, but none of us is talentless. If my own life is in any way representative, we don’t make good use of most of those talents. Some we might not ever use at all. We ineptly miss so many opportunities to do things that are useful, good, or beautiful. In other words, we fail — but we can be grateful even for our failures, if we learn from them.

Karl Keating, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, has engaged in Catholic apologetics for more than four decades and is the author of 20 books. His most recent is Sun, Storm, and Solitude: Discovering Hidden Italy on the Cammino di San Benedetto. He is completing the last of a series of four books on hiking and backpacking. The series title is How to Fail at Hiking. This article is based on a talk he gave at the Diocese of Scranton’s sixth annual Catholic Men’s Conference on October 30, 2021.

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The foregoing article, "A Life’s Worth of Failure, an Abundance of Gratitude," was originally published in the July-Auagust 2022 issue of the New Oxford Review and is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.