The Number 75

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been thinking about the number 75. 

A friend of mine – a glass blower – is in Spain taking surfing lessons.  His first day, he failed 75 times to get up on his board, only briefly managing to stand upright five times.

Seventy-five times and he kept trying.  Equally striking, the focus of his story was on the five times he stood up.

Many people would have walked away, convinced they couldn´t learn to surf.  Some would have blamed the teacher. Or the board. Or the weather.  I hear these stories all the time.  I call them quitting stories.   The storyteller just couldn´t do it.  They tried, but it just wasn´t in the cards.   The reality is that it is easier to start something new than to keep trying.  Closets and garages become filled with guitars, treadmills and other quitting paraphernalia.

Quitting can become a habit.  Sometimes, someone´s entire story is about one failure after another.  There are a lot of professional victims out there.  I´m not interested in their dramatic woe-is-me tales of helplessness.

Give me something I can use.

Henri Bressons said that a photographer´s first 10,000 photos were his worse.  He wasn´t talking about photos, he was talking about persistence, the act of going on in spite of obstacles and discouragements.

Here´s the thing—we cannot be anything we want to be.  We can only be what we persevere at.

My friend is a working artist.  He gets up every day and blows glass.  My friend knows that nothing else matters except showing up and doing the work.  He is simply using this habit to learn to surf.  My friend is not trying to be good; he is trying to be better.

Children know something adults should learn: not to be ashamed of falling, but to get up and try again.  Suzuki calls this beginner`s mind.  Many of us are so cautious, so afraid of failing, that we don´t want to try anything new.  If we are not careful, this attitude grows stronger as we grow older, until we are dead long before we stop breathing.

When I was married, my husband and I had a group of acquaintances.  We alternated coming up with things to do as a group.  Once, when it was my turn, I picked roller skating.  Everybody groaned but I insisted.  Off we went.

We were the oldest people at the rink.  Everybody else was kids or adolescents.  More groaning.

It had been years since I skated.  As soon as I stopped wobbling, I tried doing the grapevine, the heel-toe and the moonwalk.

BOOM!

When I got a few basic dance moves under my belt, I flipped around and started skating backward.

BOOM! BOOM! (Sorry kid, didn´t mean to knock you down.)

When I got comfortable going backward, I decided to try a pirouette.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

I finally managed a turn, but it wasn´t very elegant and involved a lot of arm flapping.  I looked down at my torn jeans and laughed, pushed off and tried again.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!  One of my braids came undone.

When it was time to go, the strangest conversation took place among my acquaintances as we were unstrapping our skates.  It went like this: “I only fell once”, “I didn´t fall at all”, “I saw you fall three times.” My friends were focused on not falling. The fewer times they fell, the more successful they felt. They skated to avoid falling rather than try something new.

Meanwhile, in Spain, my friend falls 75 times and gets back on his board.  In the afternoon, he is taking French lessons, no doubt making hundreds of mistakes.  I can hear him laughing from here.

I have been thinking about number 75.  We need more stories like that.  The stories we tell each other matter.

Tell us something we can use.