Mistaken

The thing about mistakes is that really they are small things. Mostly. Tiny. Things that, small as they are, have huge consequences. Like grains of sand on a dune spiraling downward, disrupting its neighbors until it all come cascading down the side, burying everything in its wake. Like a tiny snowflake barreling down a mountaintop, freezing to other flakes and careening down into an avalanche to bury and freeze everything below.

Mistakes start out so innocuously. 

And in a moment that you can’t get back, they become so much bigger. In a moment you can’t get back they have changed the course of your life- maybe someone else’s.

Of course, everyone makes mistakes. That is the common bit bandied about. Everyone makes mistakes and it is best to learn from them. While everyone does make mistakes, how and when and what kind of damage everyone’s mistakes leave…well that varies greatly.

The thing about my mistakes is that I can usually see the instant things went wrong. The thing I said, or didn’t say. The thing I did or didn’t do. The thing that if I had a time machine, I could blink back to that singular moment and take my life on a decidedly different path.

Only I can’t. 

There are no take-backs, big or little mess-ups there is no undoing, instead I am left to fix what can be fixed and leave the rest as it is. There should be no wallowing. No playing over and over in my mind the way things might have been different. The point is, things aren’t different.

When I first arrived in South Africa, Peace Corps gave us all a copy of The Gift of Fear. I remember very little about the book, all 432 pages, except its overarching theme that fear is a precursor to something horrible. Fear is a gift of sorts, a portent of horrible possibilities. Only, once something horrible happens, fear leaves. In some ways, fear is connected to the unknown (pain). You can’t be fearful of what has already happened. 

I want to believe that guilt or shame or whatever it is that makes mistakes feel so bad (aside from the consequences of them), is the same. That once the mistake is made there is no space for the bad feeling to accompany the error in judgment or miscalculation. Only, it doesn’t work that way for me.

My friend had little patience with me today as I sorted through the freshness of something in my world gone wrong. She saw my distress as self-indulgent, I imagine, or at the very, least unproductive. She wanted me to own my fault and move on; I only managed half of that. She’s right, I know she’s right. All I can do is move on, try to fix what is fixable – yes - but move on. There is no magic time machine. There is nothing that lamentations can do except make me feel bad. And that serves no one.

I’m not quite wired that way. 

I can’t seem to immediately dismiss the icky feeling that messing up fills me with. I carry it – at least a piece of it – with me always. 

It isn’t that I want to. It isn’t that I think it makes me a good person or serves a greater purpose, I know it doesn’t.  I just haven’t figured out how to put them down yet- not entirely. They get lighter over time, recede into the shadows and only pop up periodically, but I do carry them. I’d like to say they help me not to make the same mistakes again…and mostly that is true…but I think the extra weight does at least as much harm as good.

I bought some white sage a while back, thinking that I might want to cleanse my space. Maybe it’ll air our more than my apartment…cleanse my mind as well and let the mistakes, and my lamentations about them, go up in white smoke.