I love to cook. All kinds of food, but particularly breads, cakes, pies, muffins, cookies – all things carb! My usual MO is to follow the recipe, and then, based on my experience, I tweak the ingredients. Sometimes, particularly when making things like breads, or custard-based dishes that can be a bit temperamental, failure is inevitable.

Failure is a good thing. Because without failure, you don’t grow and learn. You learn to deal with your feelings about the failure – can I get over my irritation and anger?  You consider what lead up to the failure – did I add the egg yolks when the cream was too hot? Is the yeast okay?

As a parent I feel that failure is an incredibly important experience for my kids – on the sports field, work assignments, icing a cake. Because I want them to develop the skills, so that when failure in adulthood happens – which it inevitably will – they have some practice.

 “I have not failed.  I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work,” Thomas Edison.

When my marriage ended last year, it was interesting to see how people reacted. I decided to own it and say – my marriage failed.  I felt stronger and more true to myself being able to say that out loud.  One of my friends felt that it was erroneous – my marriage had lasted for nearly 14 years and had produced 3 kids, and had weathered two moves, one internationally, one between states and the care of a child with cancer. She said my marriage had not failed, it had ended.

Failure means “lack of success, not achieving the desired ends, not meeting a desired objective.”  All these definitions do, indeed, sound like what happens when your bread fails to rise, your custard won’t thicken, or your marriage ends in divorce.  And I’m okay with that.  You know why?

Because I’ve made loads of great breads, pies, custard-based ice-creams, creme brûlées, and had just a few failures.  I make an amazing flour less chocolate cake, a killer Victoria sponge, yummy tangerine cake and my breads are delicious.  These failures have helped me learn what to do next time and I improved (one year my mum and I failed to make a creme brûlée after three attempts & we decided the hot humid French weather was against us and opened a bottle of wine and took the pre-made carton of custard out of the fridge to brûlée!)

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default,” JK Rowling

And, my marriage, although it ended, lasted a long time and although the divorce has been vile and acrimonious, ensuring that I can never be friends with my ex, we did produce three amazing children. And, further, as a result of the end of my marriage I have found my voice: I won’t be treated that badly again, which given that I hope to live another 50 years, is a wonderful thing to learn & an important thing to model for my children, particularly my daughter.

“Success is not built on success. It’s built on failure. It’s built on frustration. Sometimes its built on catastrophe,” Sumner Redstone

Copyright 2015, YogaBrained LLC, Tamsin Astor

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