Hits and Misses

This seems counter-intuitive, and goes against the old adage that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," but if it happens that you're consistently succeeding at all you do — say, in running your D&D game — that can be a sign of your failing to evolve and grow better at your game.  That you're playing it too safe, or consistently sticking to things you already know you can do well.  Which, you may not wish to hear, limits you.

There's another old saying, one that says that if you're not missing, you're not taking enough swings.  The relationship to baseball aside, the notion is that if you're actively putting yourself out there, if you're taking risks and trying new things, you have a greater chance of becoming something better than you are.

Where it comes to D&D and worldbuilding, we can get far too concerned about "success" and "failure," so much that it makes us blind to larger ideas.  Success is not really the point.  Worse, a period of success can lead to an increased sense of pressure and expectation upon us, in the sense that because we ran one really good session, ALL the sessions have to be unexpectedly good now.  Or we might think, even better!  Which is a trap of course.  We're never going to succeed in making every session better than the last ... and if we try to do that, it's only a matter of time before we fall and break our ego.

I don't think very much about whether or not I've "succeeded" in creating a strong game world or a good campaign.  I know those things are often in the mind of people who are certain they don't have either — and want them.  But something as esoteric as a setting or a good group can't be "possessed" in black and white terms ... especially since a group has its own motivations and reasons for showing up each game, much of which has nothing to do with us.

If we should wish for anything, it ought not to be success, but resiliency.  That is, the capacity to bounce back from adversity, to just keep going, to not worry if we're doing it right or wrong because doing it is the real benefit here.  The idea is somewhat behind those people who say they want to make mistakes, because they've learned from their mistakes and they want always to learn more.  Truth is, however, you don't actually have to make the mistake first.  Learning is always available, mistake or no.

But we've got to do it.  We've got to get up and get started, especially on those days when starting is the last thing we want to do.  Resiliancy results from knowing that we're going to miss, that sometimes we're going to miss most of the time, but that the misses don't matter.  Life is not baseball.  In life, we get about a million strikes and for that reason, we can miss and miss and miss, so long as we're conscious that it's the hit is still going to count when it happens.

That's the mystery behind the curtain that we've pulled closed behind every "genius," hiding their mistakes.  We make much of Isaac Newton inventing calculus in a few weeks time ... but we're ignorant of how many years he tried and failed to invent calculus before that.  We don't see the hundreds of pictures that Cezanne and Turner threw away or painted over.  We don't hear recordings of Stravinski's orchestra or Pink Floyd when the wrong notes were played or the symbiosis didn't happen.  We hear or see or get the "hit" ... all the misses fade into the background and just don't matter.

But of course, down here on the ground, as we are missing ourselves, we're hyperconscious of that fact.  The only thing we seem able to focus on it our missing all the time.  Which is why, when something works, we can fool ourselves into thinking we've got it all settled, that it's great, that it's all it ever needs to be ... despite the occasionally criticisms from those who don't like it, or those out here in the world urging us not to settle, not to just accept the mediocre as "enough," but to dig in and start swinging again.

We can't be afraid of missing.  We can't let missing become part of what we are.  It's part of the process of our striving for improvement.  A part we have to embrace, and let roll off our backs, knowing this is the path worth taking.  Moreover, by understanding new things, by trying new approaches, we open our minds to the fact that both exist — that there is a different way to do things.  That there are new things to do.  We know, because we've done them.  And we're ready to do more, when we find it or think it up ourselves.  Obtaining practice at that strategy trains our imagination and intuitiveness in ways that serve us well as creators and as people.

And so, get out and practice.  Get out and swing.