Thought For The Evening - Mistakes Happen!
We have been getting extensive landscaping work done to the garden. It has been challenging. There are no afternoon naps on the sofa as someone is always looking in the window. I have resorted to wearing AirPods permanently to drown out the noise of men in the toilet. But the hardest part has been making so many decisions. We first looked at paving samples back in March. “Is that brown?” I said, “I don’t do brown”. “It’s earth,” Kyle said. “Is that one beige?” I said. “They’ll look great together,” he said.
Last Friday afternoon, they started to lay the paving in the torrential rain. It was gruelling. They managed sixteen rows then left, calling it a day.
“I don’t think I like it,” I said. “Do you like it?”.
“I’m happy if you’re happy,” my husband said.
I called in the pragmatic thirteen-year-old. “What do you think?”. “It looks like an optical illusion,” she muttered and headed back to her bedroom.
I paced about all weekend. By Sunday evening, I had a knot in my stomach. “There’s too much brown, you’re going to have to ring and tell them”. “And, don’t be making it all about me,” I shouted as I headed out the door.
“Did you do it?” I checked when I returned. “Yes, I told them you didn’t like it. They’ll lift it in the morning”.
On Monday, there was only one way out of the house so I had to face them. They were utterly gracious. “It’s better to fix it now than regret it later,” Kyle said.
Life is full of decisions but we constantly live in fear of making the wrong one. We don’t try out that idea, make a move, take that risk, follow our dream because ‘what if…’. But, where people go wrong is not in the mistakes they make, it is in failing to correct when the error is realised. Even though the project is going nowhere, the relationship just isn’t working, the job isn’t as advertised, we focus on the investment already made and continue on rather than change course. Admitting something hasn’t worked out and calling it a day takes courage.
Rather than worry about the mistakes we might make or dwell on the ones we have made, let’s see mistakes as an inevitable consequence of a life well lived. They show we tried. As a wise man once said “sometimes, the best learning we ever get is from our failures rather than our successes”¹.
