In a noisy bar in Avalon I tried to call you
But on a midnight watch I realized why twice you ran away

Think about
Think about how many times I have fallen
Spirits are using me larger voices callin’
What Heaven brought you and me cannot be forgotten..

So we cheated and we lied and we tested
And we never failed to fail, it was the easiest thing to do
You will survive being bested
Somebody fine will come along, make me forget about loving you
In the Southern Cross….

— lyrics written by Stephen Stills, Rick Curtis, and Michael Curtis

Is it a good idea to begin a post by quoting a song lyric?  I have no idea but am willing to find out what happens.  The tune Southern Cross by Crosby Stills and Nash was enormously popular in 1982 covered many times by Jimmy Buffett, is one of my favorites.  I have never been to sea as a profession.  Once I spent ten days on a freighter out of San Francisco, as a passenger traveling to Yokohama Japan.  On a ship many hours are inevitably spent in self reflection.  Hours are spent peering at the horizon, hours at night, taking in the dark star lit dome of the sky.  One has this conversation with one’s self, “what was I thinking when I said, when I did…  Was I thinking at all?”

The lyric lines are about an individual having such a reflexive conversation.  He has left behind a woman who due to ignorance, impatience, weakness, he has wronged.  He made a failed attempt to reach her by phone while in a noisy bar in Avalon.  He understands now, why she rejected him.  His new self understanding comes with sorrow over his mistakes.  And he recognizes that the failure was not his alone:  We never failed to fail…

Fallibilism, is the propensity, the natural inclination to miss the target, to act hastily, to act according to one’s feelings, without mindful consideration.  We (you, I, everyone of us) do this all of the time.  We make mistakes, there are infinite ways* to “get it wrong.”  There’s a very narrow margin to hit the target dead center.  Fallibalism is a strange term, perhaps the very best one describing the human predicament.  To be human is to make mistakes.  Can we not think of education as a process of learning how-to-learn from our mistakes?  And about learning from the stories of others?  “If you desire this outcome, then whatever you do, do not do …  Do this instead.”

Is it possible to be fully human without being a life-long learner?

Sometimes our failure can be horrific, even fatal.  It matters little how we felt at the time.  What is germane is only cause and effect.  I have in mind the mob that stormed the halls of Congress, the Capitol building on January 6th.  After being urged on by the president the doors of the building were forced open, the mob surged inside searching for members of congress.  If my eyes do not deceive me, this was a event of gleeful excitement for many, judging by all of the iPhone selfies that were taken.  For every person involved, and for us as a nation, the event was a massive failure, a failure to be regretted, an act to be learned from — an act which we will never again allow to happen.

Stephen Stills writer of Southern Cross explained, “It’s about using the power of the universe to heal your wounds.”  That is what we need.

It is time for a song is it not?

*Error is multiform (for evil is a form of the unlimited, as in the old Pythagorean imagery, and good of the limited), whereas success is possible in one way only (which is why it is easy to fail and difficult to succeed – easy to miss the target and difficult to hit it.)   — Aristotle,  Nichomachean Ethics (c. 330 b.c.)