Sam Cook column: A good day to contemplate failure

When I awoke the other day and saw the temperature was 48 degrees, I knew I had to collect the yellow dog and go for a walk. I hadn't seen a temperature like that for a few months. I wanted to get out and move around in it and inhale it for a while.

If you love fall, a temperature like that gets up inside of you and starts a little movie in your brain that features mist rising from the water, clumps of orange berries hanging from mountain ash trees and warblers moving through the brush. And certainly, a rooster pheasant cackling as it rises off the dog's nose into an October sky.

So, I'm not sure why my thoughts turned to failure on that sunrise walk. But they did. Sure as heck, as the dog bounced ahead of me exuding joy, I found myself contemplating failures I have known.

Oh, there have been plenty. Most of them were associated with learning curves.

Learning to cross-country ski, I piled it up so many times - skis clacking, snow flying and finally, the cold silence of a face planted in deep powder.

Or the time my younger brother and I ran out of the Colorado mountains like scared puppies in the middle of the night when a storm moved in. We were terrified. We had never been in a thunderstorm at altitude. We slunk off to a motel and went back for our gear in the morning.

Or learning to drive a clutch, killing the engine over and over and over at that small-town intersection, my dad somehow patiently letting me figure it out. I suppose he had failed the same way years earlier.

Those are the easy failures, like the ones I continue to accept to this day - missing an easy passing shot at a flushing grouse, failing to catch an inferior word choice when editing something I've written.

You can rationalize that such failures are good for you. They keep you humble. They make you more empathetic with others when they go through the same process. The failures still sting, but tomorrow is a new day. Life goes on.

The failures that hurt most, though, are the ones that you might not even recognize until years later. The failure to take a risk. An opportunity not seized. Or the many failures that accompany being a parent or a partner in marriage.

All we can do is muddle through the best we know how, seeking the counsel of friends or parents or trusted mentors along the way. None of us has it all dialed in, even those who look so polished from a distance.

I guess we aren't growing if we aren't failing now and then. You just hope the consequences aren't too great to overcome - or for others to forgive.

That's what I was thinking about on an otherwise glorious late summer day, walking in the woods. I arrived at the 40-foot cliff overlooking a broad stream valley below. The yellow dog found a puddle of rainwater to lap in a cleft on the rocks.

The breeze was already up, out of the northwest. The warblers ought to be moving, I thought.

SAM COOK is a Duluth News Tribune columnist and outdoors writer. Reach him at (218) 723-5332 or scook@duluthnews.com . Find his Facebook page at facebook.com/SamCookOutdoors or his blog at samcook.areavoices.com.