MIS-TAKE

This quote showed up in my newsfeed this morning: “More people would learn from their mistakes if they weren’t so busy denying them.”

Interesting quote, don’t ya think?  Is it true?  Why is it that we all have such a hard time admitting when we’ve made a mistake or are wrong about something, anything?

There was a minister at a Unity church I used to attend who loved to take words out of our vocabulary and look at their root meanings or reframe them in such a way as to focus our attention on them differently.  I remember his taking the word mistake and breaking it down to “mis-take.”  When you look at it this way, its quite like taking or making a mis-step.  We’ve stumbled, taken a false step, obviously didn’t have all the information we needed or ignored it if we did, we need a retake.  In golf terms, we need a mulligan, lol!

So I guess I’m back to asking why we have such a hard time admitting it when we make those mis-takes?  Why do we fight so hard to deny them?  I think its a combination of things: how our family of origin reacted to them, how society frowns so hard on them, how our culture has fast become a “them vs us”  overall mentality and last but not least, our egos!  Somewhere along the ways of our lives, we’ve absorbed that we must be perfect.  If we’re not, we might lose someone’s love, we might lose our jobs, our charm, our beauty, our way of life.... You get the picture.  Somehow we will have fallen short of perceived notions of what we should be, either our own or others', which makes us “less than.”  Heaven forbid! Ego alert here!

Here’s your newsflash: none of us are perfect and likely never will be.  We can abdicate all that prior conditioning. And think about this. If we’re always running scared of making mistakes, and denying them when we inevitably do, we will have missed the very beauty to be found in them!  Yes, even those really, really, bad, horrible ones have the beauty of a lesson, a path to growth in them! Know what happens when we don’t learn or grow from those mis-takes? When we keep denying them to ourselves or others? We condemn ourselves to making them over and over and over, again.  Delightful, yes?  I didn’t think so!

Let’s make a deal, you and me.  I’ll slow down and admit when I’ve made a mis-take, try to learn the lesson, forgive myself (yes, that’s a vital part) and move on toward making better choices.  Will you allow yourself the same latitude? OK! Game on!