Mistakes.

Don’t you hate making mistakes? You get something wrong and there’s a mess to clear up or something is broken that can’t be mended. A relationship, a precious object, that corner that wasn’t quite at right angles, the stitch that was dropped, that incautious comment; they all result in some problem that can’t easily be undone.
I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. You make a mistake and probably say ‘something’ under your breath or even out loud. Usually what then follows is a litany of self deprecation where you tell yourself how stupid you are, how you should know better, how you should have been more careful etc, etc, etc. What can follow next is self inflicted mortification and embarrassment. “I feel such a fool” you tell yourself or, “What on earth did they think of me?” If you attempt to answer these sorts of questions it will probably be with a bit more self flagellation. There are, of course, more serious mistakes where you believe the harm that you have done is irredeemable, beyond forgiveness, and cannot be rectified. These are the most damaging of all mistakes because they affect other people and your relationship with them.
Mistakes have many causes; sometimes it’s a lack of attention, our mind wanders off from a particular task and our hand or foot slips, or we move too quickly or a dozen of other small things. At other times it can be that we act or speak without thinking – this is the classic ‘putting your foot in it’. At other times again it’s because we come to realise that we made a wrong decision about something, perhaps because we did not find out all the facts at the time or even didn’t know them or we were rushed into a decision.
None of these things are intended to cause a problem; some were just plain accidents, others were caused by not focussing on the task in hand, still others by lack of awareness of some information or fact. Some mistakes are inherited from the past. They are things you learnt to do a long time ago. Back then, when you were a child, they sort of got you through, but now they will keep causing you problems.
Whatever sort of mistake you make remember that everybody makes mistakes and mistakes help us to learn. They give us the opportunity to identify what went wrong and to do something different to get a better outcome.

“Mistakes have the power to turn you into something better than you were before.” (Anonymous)

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