Boris Pasternak, Russian poet and novelist, reportedly said that life creates events to distract our current attention away from it, so that we can get on with work that cannot be accomplished any other way.
I grew up in a career that made much about policy success and failure, and then later, project or program success and failure. I now think that success and failure are inadequate terms to describe the accomplishments of real people, in real time, with real problems. How do both the people and the accomplishments count, when terms like “progress” and “success” are no longer as useful? What do we do with the fact that accomplishing things means less about “keep on going” than it does about “this is what we have nevertheless done, even with setbacks, when it matters”? Reducing the latter behavior to “coping” and “sub-par” seems to me one crisis too many.
It just isn’t that longer time horizons make for mixed results rather than declarations of overall success or failure of policies, programs and projects. There’s also the no-small matter of hope. Hope, as the philosopher Ernst Bloch put it, doesn’t fail. Yes, hope is disappointed but it does not fail. Hope, in this view, is what accomplishments sustain, and so too failure and success are not something we associate with that hope.
