Mistakes | Word Meditations 40/366

To those who say “I hope you know you’re making the biggest mistake of your life,” simply say “thank you for caring but it won’t be so.”

Not because you’re confident that you’ll be alright. You know — you know — you have moments of weakness. Bus simply you can turn your head over your shoulder as you’re leaving and gracefully add: “I plan on making bigger mistakes. Because I never plan to stop learning, to stop growing, or to stop experiencing.”

No one wants us to make mistakes. We have to get everything right. And sure, there are things worth studying before your let experience teach you, and mistakes you don’t really want to be making — ever. But who’s to say that a conscious life choice is a mistake? A studied, meditated upon, and in your own way calculated move — who’s to judge that as a mistake?

And all because it doesn’t fit with their idea of what your life should be. Of what life should be.

Yet, you don’t even remember to have made that comment. Did it mean nothing to you to try and crush me? There was never any acknowledgment. No, “hey, I still think it was a mistake, but you turned out ok after all.” No repentance, no recognition, no discussion…

And yet I let your opinion define me so much. You confuse me, you intrigue me, you turn me upside down. How you can judge and criticize and then forget and pretend it never happened?

You had obviously thought about my choice long before I pressed you hard with my questioning to blurt out that I was a making the biggest mistake. Have you not thought about it afterwards? Have you not come to any conclusions? You have no thoughts to share?

Mistakes. Perhaps my biggest mistake has been in listening to you, in heeding you, in paying you any attention. Perhaps my biggest mistake is this unwillingness to let go of what is not serving me; to let go of the phantom of an ideal that never was and never will be.

Perhaps my biggest mistake is that I’ve tried to idealize you as much as you’ve tried to idealize me.