Contesting the Existence of Mistakes

I was on my way home this evening and for some reason, my mind caught me in a loop discussion about mistakes. After some initial musings, I was surprised to find that part of me contested that there was, actually, no such thing as a mistake. Now, this statement does seem quite odd for me to be making because I have been feeling as though my life lately has been sitting on the brunt of several rather glaring mistakes. In fact, in the past few months I have felt as though I've been completely unaware of a series of repeating mistakes that I've been cycling through over the last several years. These mistakes seem to have become ingrained into my personality and I felt as though I kept making them without realizing the repetition but feeling unhappy by the recurring results. People often characterize negative parts of their lives as "being in a rut" and this was no exception. A friend of mine once gave the analogy of digging himself so deeply into a single, circular path that when he tried to drive over it again and keep to higher ground, he couldn't help but keep slipping back into the rut he'd formed for himself.

I like this because I think it's a good characterization of people's brilliant attempts to improve through often daunting pathways. I also think that it's an experience we can all understand as I think it's something we've all been through.

So lately, I've been feeling as though I got picked up by some magnificent zeppelin that is now allowing me to view myself from afar, catching all these negative habits and 'mistakes' and seeing how I fall into cycles of negative behavior. It's a really great experience; it helps me take in all these things and hone my skill at understanding where I can go with them, how I can improve those aspects of my self (and note, I'm speaking directly of the 'self', not misspelling!). Overall, it may be sometimes daunting to observe my flaws so bare, but it is a rewarding experience that I treasure right now in my life.

This brings me back to my questions about mistakes. I am gathering a lot of information about myself and who I want to be and spending a lot of time trying to incorporate that into my person, practicing better habits and hopefully, becoming a better me than I've ever been before. But I'm only here, in this state of self-observance and improvement, because of every single negative thing that has occurred up to this point.

I'm not the sort of person that believes that life is already set out before we enter it and that everything that happens was supposed to happen that way and at that time. I feel like your everyday actions have very strong impacts on not only your self but on the lives of those around you. I think this creates a precarious web between you and the lives of those you choose to touch. Looking at it that way, it demands a great deal of responsibility for the way you decide to interact and behave with friends and family. Thus, I honestly believe I've had my hand in every negative event that has happened to me recently, which is why I've been considering these things as 'mistakes' with such force lately.

My quandary lies in the fact that I do believe I've learned so much and grown considerably from dealing with these recent developments in my life. How can such an event that encourages a great stage of growth be termed a mistake, then? I know I wouldn't have learned every single interesting lesson recently if I hadn't been put in exactly the place I now find myself.

When I have these kind of discussions with myself where I contest the existence of something that seems so trivial and yet basic to human life, I tend to try and strip the facts to the core of the matter. I did so here and this is where I ended up. Choices are available to us in our daily life (and here, I'm not only necessarily terming a 'choice' as whether to go to a restaurant or stay home and cook but stretching it to cover all manner of sins; you choose to be in a good mood despite things that aggravate you, you choose to show affection to your significant other even if they are doing something that annoys you, etc.). Sometimes, these choices weigh in on a neutral scale; either choice affects you and those around you in the same way (wear blue or wear green, it doesn't matter just put on a shirt!). But when these choices have more importance on them, they start falling off into either a positive reaction or a negative one. These are the times when your significant other is excited about something from the book they're reading and wants to read it to you. You can choose to bask in their enthusiasm and their desire to share it with you, or you can become annoyed because you don't want to interrupt your reading to hear some antiquated discussion that will require your full attention and which won't make complete sense out of context.

Life is grayscale so there's no telling which choice is necessarily right or wrong but you're going to learn something no matter what you do. Choose to be positive, reap the benefits of people around you responding well to that positivity. Choose to be negative, reap the benefits of learning about the importance people play in your life and make sound realizations about their ability to choose to distance themselves from you.

What I'm basically trying to communicate is that situations are always going to be completely within your power if you decide to view them that way. If you choose to label your life as a series of mistakes, that can be beneficial to your growth but because life is up for personal interpretation, you are going to have to hold yourself responsible for attracting that kind of negativity. If you choose to see the world without mistakes, to level the playing field of choice and decide that events in life merely develop your understand of yourself, then you may give yourself a lot more positive power than you thought yourself capable of.

On the other hand, this argument is something that makes me relatively nervous; if you take out the existence of mistakes, you open a door to seeing yourself in an all-too perfect manner. There's a precarious line to dance between dissolving the idea of mistakes in order to simply have a peaceful mind about negative and positive reactions and lessons in life, and deciding that everything you do is right. This, like nearly all of my thoughts about life recently, leads down the road into a whole mind cramp I have about perception and how your mind comes careening into your life and can flip things upside down without your realizing it. But that's a whole different discussion.