Everyone wants to succeed. However, I discovered through personal experience and painstaking observation that success is overrated or undeservedly glorified. If you succeed, you pay more taxes, your relatives increase in number, you succumb to temptations that contradict health, ethics and religion – but which are otherwise only available to wealthy people. You fear thieves, you worry about your health and you stop eating what you like, your wife becomes more demanding, you become concerned about your children being influenced by bad company and drugs, the house's fence becomes higher (perhaps with some barbwire on top too), and you install cameras on the fence, the house's gates and the back entrance. However, if you fail, you fail alone, and people leave you be. I am writing at the backdrop of a gathering I had with some friends in London, in which we gossiped about some other friends who were abroad, and went over our lifetimes together, and over who succeeded and who failed. Every Arab who is not a doctor or an engineer is supposedly a failure. Since I was a teenager, and till today, the measure of success is entering medical school or engineering school. However, I was never fit for either and claimed that I did not want to enter them at any rate, because my cousin was a doctor while my other cousins are engineers, and that this was more than enough in one family. Also, I said that the majority of engineering students at the American University in Beirut were Armenian, and that I had so many Armenian friends that I did not need any more. Of course, I am justifying here my personal failure and the family's disappointment in its son who did not graduate as a doctor or an engineer. However, my excuse was exposed and not accepted by my friends, and one of them criticized me and claimed that I dishearten the nation's resolve with my constant criticism and talk about the failures of the Arabs and Muslims, whether they try or not. I do not think that the nation needs any further disheartening from me for it to fail, because failure has become a part of its air, water, flesh and blood, just like avarice became a second nature to the residents of Mrou. Even the rooster there, as Al-Jahiz claimed, would pick grains and compete with hens in eating them, instead of offering those grains to the chicken like roosters do everywhere else. Ever since Tariq bin Ziyad first crossed the sea to Andalusia in 91 AH (711 AD), we have been losing the capital that we built in less than one hundred years after the message and the conquests. For the reader's information, the same small island, on which Tariq and his men landed off the coast of Iberia has been devoured by the Sea, and it no longer exists today. Then Andalusia was lost along with everything else in 1300 years of our ongoing downfall. At any rate, general failure, or the failure of the nation, did not help it relax. On the contrary, it made usurpers and both close and faraway nations covet it. But today, I want to talk about individual failure, which I find better than success. In fact, I am saying nothing new here, as there is a popular saying in the Levant [which loosely translated as]: no money, no problems. I know a story of relevance about a woman who was on her way home from shopping. She came across a homeless man who asked her for some money. She said that she is afraid he might spend it on spirits, but he said that he does not drink. She then said that he might spend it shopping but again, he answered that he has not been to a store in years. She then said that he might spend it on grooming and accessorizing, to which he answered that these things are the last things on his mind. At this point, the woman asked the homeless man to go with her and have dinner with her and her husband at their home. He said that he looks terrible and his smell is foul. She answered: I want my husband to see what someone who does not spend all their money on spirits, shopping and make-up looks like. After the gathering with my friends, I compared between success and failure, the advantage of the one over the other, and whether I should write about this subject. I would have perhaps refrained from doing so, had it not been for the fact that I read the New Yorker magazine. I usually start from the beginning with the small snippets about Broadway shows. The name of one play caught my attention, which was “The Success of Failure (or, the Failure of Success)”, written by Cynthia Hopkins, and this play was the last instalment in a trilogy also written by her. I inevitably know a little about Miss Hopkins as she is a singer, songwriter, dancer, actress and playwright. Yet, she complains about failure, although if she succeeds in only one of those careers that would be enough, let alone the fact that she made it in Broadway, which means that she is already a resounding success. I read that she complained that her alcoholism in her twenties meant that large chunks of her memories are missing, and that she misses being young and wild. Come visit us, miss, and you will be up to your ears in both youthful and old wildness. [email protected]
