To Err is Wonderfully Human
The Value of Making Mistakes
This past week I’ve been recovering from a cold so I’ve had more than the usual amount of down time. In between blowing my nose and taking medicine for an aching head, I’ve been knitting, binge-watching some television, listening to various all kinds of interviews, talks, and podcasts available on the internet (I’ll post the list at the end of this essay), and thinking over some stuff that happened at my job.
All of this input swirled around in my head with no great consequence. But then I had to rip out about 12 rounds of the hat I was knitting (think of it as undoing about 2 vertical inches of perfectly arranged little tiles) and a new thought emerged: Mistakes are essential to the learning process. Mistakes, handled appropriately, lead to new information. Mistakes are the catalyst for growth.
We are human*; therefore, we are going to make mistakes. Sometimes we accept these mistakes without even realizing it, like when we’re toddlers and absorbing the intricacies of grammar while learning to communicate. Other times (especially as adults), we mentally beat up on ourselves for mistakes, even when it was for a result we could not have foreseen.
*I was going to also add that we are not machines, but then I remembered the myriad glitches I’ve dealt with from computers, internet connections, and misaligned parts. Nope, that is an essay for another day!
When we’re children and making mistakes in grammar, syntax, spelling, and pronunciation, parents accept that we’re in the middle of a process, so they don’t berate us for not knowing the rules. We’re free to continue absorbing information and free to make mistakes as we experiment with what we’ve learned.
Feel free to skip this part if you like. It’s a true story that illustrates a very funny error related to language:
One of my nieces, when she came home from school (she was in Grade 1) one day, was met by her dad who asked her how her day went. Her eyes got really big as she confided, “I learned the F word today.”
My brother kind of rolled his eyes but he said to her, “OK, let’s hear it.”
She leaned in really close to him and whispered, “It’s ‘shit.’”
(My brother said, wisely, “And that’s the last time I want to hear it from you.”)
At some point afterward, though, we learn to attach shame to mistakes. I don’t know when it started for me, but I know that I lived with it for DECADES before I realized that all of the cruddy messages I’d been given about mistakes were entirely wrong.
I was able to start undoing the damage when I was working the 12 Steps. Step 4 is a “searching and fearless moral inventory” and Step 5 is talking over that inventory with a sponsor. When that was done and I moved on to Step 6 (in which one is “ready to have God remove all these defects of character”), my sponsor asked me to look at everything I’d written and to sort the inventory into three lists:
Things I’m ready to let go of
Things I’m willing to let go of
Things I’m not willing to let go of
I thought it was going to be an exercise in how I had to work extra hard on everything in List #3, but I was mistaken. My sponsor turned it into a discussion of how our “defects of character” (the aspects of ourselves we’re not proud of) are actually giving us something that we feel is important and therefore hard to part with.
Here’s an example from my experience: I had “gossip” in List #3. When I took a good, fearless look at my habit of gossiping, I was able to see that it gave me a kind of assurance that I would be valuable to some people because I had useful inside information. It was hard for me to let go of that habit because I was afraid that I would no longer have friends (if, indeed, they could have been called that). I was afraid that I would have no value.
The other thing I learned from my sponsor was that the objective of the lists was to build awareness and determine over time when I was willing to move something from one column to another. For example, by examining the habit of gossip and what it was doing for me, I had started on the process of becoming willing to let go of it. The thing is, I couldn’t examine the habit of gossip if I wasn’t willing to build awareness of it: When I was doing it. Why I was doing it. What feelings I had that built up to my need to engage in the habit.
I couldn’t build that awareness if I felt shameful about the mistakes I made.
I couldn’t have awareness if I didn’t accept that I was human and therefore I was going to make mistakes.
All of this leads to the my biggest epiphany of this week’s cogitations: Mistakes are how God’s grace can find me and heal me.
I’m not saying that it’s the only way that God’s grace can get to me. I’m saying that what I used to view as shameful is actually something to celebrate. When I admit an error, I am opening myself up in a positive way to changing myself. As with the hat I was knitting, I was able rethink how I was making the decreases which make that lovely little dome at the top of the hat so that it fits comfortably on the recipient’s head. As with the gossip, I was able to see that my value to co-workers and (real) friends was actually in other skills and characteristics.
On top of all of that, I realized that making mistakes at knitting is how I became a more accomplished knitter. Making mistakes meant that [1] I knew how to avoid some mistakes before they could happen and [2] I was building my confidence to undo new mistakes as I figured out a better way to do what I was doing.
One other thing: I was re-watching “His Dark Materials” this past week because I like the way the story is constructed and the wonderful graphics. (I don’t have a lot of patience for the overwrought allegory of it, but I’m willing to hang around for a good story.) In the course of this 3-season series, I began to wonder whether the writers of the Adam and Eve story were outrageously mistaken, or if for centuries we have assigned a damaging mythology to that tale. I don’t know about you, but I had always been taught that Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden as a punishment. Thinking about God’s grace, however, I’m thinking we got it all wrong.
While in the proverbial Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were still just like little kids — innocent of their human capacity to make mistakes. (Have you ever been so absorbed in what you were doing that you didn’t realize someone was so near you that you’d have run into them if you’d turned without looking? It’s completely innocent, and it happens.) So, what if what really happened was that they made a transition into that part of life when we become aware of how utterly human we are? I’m thinking even God was a little surprised when they started covering up their nakedness because God didn’t think it was shameful for them to be unclothed.
If I were a scholarly person, I might get into a discussion of how the serpent and eating the apple were an allegory of the onset of puberty, but I’m sure someone already thought of that.
What I’m saying is that we were never exiled from God’s grace. The story of Adam and Eve is about how we grow from the total innocence (and lack of responsibilities) of childhood into the knowledge and challenges of adult life. It’s a life-long process of learning from teachers, from experience, and from mistakes. Then someone comes along (like Jesus, or maybe just a sponsor) who reminds us in a way that the grace was always present; we just need to accept it.
I don’t know. I’m not a preacher. I’m just think it’s time to quit blaming other people for the crud in our lives and just accept that there’s going to be crud.
So, however it is you practice your personal spirituality or faith, I encourage you to think of mistakes as a building block rather than a stumbling block.
And that’s all I have for today.
From my listening history this past week: