Sometimes the clearest perspectives on our own lives come from someone observing from the outside.
Recently, I had the chance to chat with the brilliant and engaging TMFritz on her podcast On The Human Spectrum. Our conversation was full of laughter, insight and was guided by her thoughtful and wide-ranging questions. The first of which was about my idea of “flirting with failure.”
Flirting with Failure comes from an online course I created about building physical balance. In the body, taking yourself to your edges of competency is essential to improving ability and capacity. For example, the more you avoid movements that are on the edge of your balance capability, the worse your balance becomes. It’s a hugely important and powerful concept.
But frankly, it seemed an odd place to start an interview.
No worries, though. I love talking about balance and I love the balance course and I was glad to talk about it.
And then, in some kind of interviewing sorcery, she turned the question on itself. She said, “I’m curious also how the idea of flirting with failure helped you grow your business.”
My brain did this little scrambly thing. “Wait. This was just a concept I use to teach a physical practice. And you’re asking me what now?”
I let my squirrely brain settle. Right away, I saw that the movement practice I’d originally trained in and taught for years was one full of rules and principles. You either got it right or you got it wrong. The practice offered crisp clarity about what it meant to succeed and fail. For my 30-something self, this felt safe. I knew exactly what I should – and should not – be doing.
Until it didn’t.
Until I started studying other modalities and exploring different practices. I saw that there were lots of ways to approach embodied movement. For more than a decade, I flirted with failure: bringing in different elements, language and approaches to encourage folks to move in and befriend their bodies.
And when COVID shut down the world, I officially disengaged from the original practice and started Nourishing Movement – including the technological leap to teaching online. (Which seems like nothing now since everybody does it but in March of 2020 it was like trying to jump to Mars.)
So yeah, my work has evolved over two decades in a series of failure flirtings.
Our conversation then wended its way to how I, as a born and bred New Englander, ended up living in Charlottesville, Virginia. Again, a surprising question, the answer to which was rooted in failure.
The choice to move to Charlottesville was one I felt I didn’t even make. The publishing company I worked for started to collapse, a whole swath of us got laid off, and I looked all over Boston for a job. When I got an offer in Charlottesville, I didn’t even consider it … until some mysterious something from somewhere nudged me to say yes. I had no idea why. It was a decision that felt like a mistake, borne of the failures of the company and my own job search – and it was one of the best I ever made.
Don’t even get me started about the two books and the art I make. Good gravy, they have been just a long string of failure flirting.
Now my work focuses on embodiment as we live longer. If we want to live dynamic, engaged lives, we have to be willing to flirt with failure. Not just in our movement -- like in balance -- but in everything.
Our bodies change, our relationships change, our preferences, curiosities and abilities change. One approach is to keep doing things that are familiar and comfortable. Those are great for keeping us grounded and relaxed. But just like challenging the body’s balance by nudging the edges of comfort, creating rich dynamic lives in the midst of life’s changes requires that we try things and mess them up and then play with something else.
Sometimes the clearest perspectives on our own lives come from someone observing from the outside. A thousand thanks to TMFritz for a delicious conversation that helped me see how flirting with failure led me to some of the bestest bits.