Contemplating mistakes
(Nimue)
We all make mistakes. The most common and forgivable sort are born from not knowing something. With the best will in the world, it is impossible to always spot where something you don’t know might trip you up and even then you aren’t going too know what it is – that’s the nature of the beast. The only thing to do is learn, chalk it up to experience, forgive yourself and move on. Do the same thing for everyone else’s innocent human cock-ups and life becomes a lot less stressful.
The more serious mistakes have other forms entirely. They come from not paying attention, from lack of care, not thinking things through, prioritising the wrong things, not taking the right things seriously and so forth. These are errors of judgement. People tend to be more defensive about them because they come from a place of shortcoming. The faster you can acknowledge them, the less harm they do. Often people choose to double down on these mistakes, protecting the lack of care or the bad priority that might look like a character flaw if examined too closely. These are the mistakes that often result in people blaming something other than themselves.
There’s not much to be done about the first kind of mistake. We all go there. Avoiding the second kind of mistake is something we can focus on. The more attention we pay and the more care we bring to what we do, the less likely such mistakes become. If we’re set on doing the right thing, we’re less likely to mess up. In my experience, the second kind of mistake often shows up as an omission. Failure to act doesn’t make us any less responsible.
Practicing gratitude is a helpful tool in all of this. It keeps us alert and attentive. Being active about compassion is another good one, as is reflection. Taking the time to think about things, rather than just going for knee jerk reactions means we are much more likely to handle situations well. A more reflective and compassionate approach to life helps us avoid making damaging mistakes.
Of course when people are inexperienced, they make poor judgements. I try to assume I’m seeing mistakes based on lack of knowledge rather than lack of care. However, if you’re dealing with a functional adult who persists in making the same mistakes despite being given information about it, that’s a whole other thing. There comes a point when the defense of ‘mistake’ no longer holds up and you have to consider that it is deliberate and malicious. These can be hard calls to make.
People who mean well will own mistakes and try to learn from them. People who do not mean well will blame anything or anyone else, and will keep claiming a ‘mistake’ to enable them to keep doing what they want to do. Sheltering behind incompetence, feigning incomprehension and acting out of a lack of care often isn’t a mistake at all, but is entirely intended. What they intended was to do it and get away with it, and the wounded responses that go with such behaviour have more to do with being called out than with feeling badly about the harm caused.
We all make mistakes. We are all capable of going down that route involving carelessness and defensiveness. At any point, anyone can choose to turn back and do something better.
