Mistakes
By LMReviews on Mar 22, 2009 in Multicultural Writing
Courtesy of Artzy Viva
Often when I am doing something completely unrelated to writing, my mind wanders toward a concept or theme that requires deeper reflection. It’s not unusual to let thoughts drift in and out of my consciousness and not really focus on the thoughts that are moving to and fro between my ears. Now I pay closer attention because I’m starting to notice that many of my most useful thoughts and revelations occur when I am interacting with nature.
I was pulling weeds, when it occurred to me how our mistakes change as we grow up. Depending on the mistake, as children, those impacted may say, “…it’s OK, it wasn’t intentional.” Then as children we go about our day possibly never thinking twice about the mistake or really recognizing the repercussions from our faulty act. In actually, someone else just accepted the consequences of our mistakes. If we spilt milk or dropped a glass, it was our parents who just managed with less milk in the house or risked cuts to clean up the glass shards.
As adults, we must bear the cost of our mistakes intentional or otherwise, because our mistakes have greater consequences than less milk at breakfast or seven place settings instead of eight. It all comes down to the increase in responsibility that makes our mistakes as adults more costly with a higher potential impact for us and others. That knowledge is offset by the repetitive nature of our tasks. Drive to work every day with little thought of the dangers until someone makes a mistake and accident or near-accident occurs. Business executives make important decisions everyday that put the livelihood of the company and their future paychecks at risk. If we didn’t become accustomed or desensitized to these responsibilities we would cease to function out of fear of the repercussions of our mistakes.
In the end, it has less to do with the mistakes we made and more to do with how we handled the impact of those mistakes. What consequences do you fear you won’t be able to handle if you make a mistake? An error-free life is a life unlived.
