Tag: making mistakes

“Did you know when you go it’s the perfect ending to the bad day I’ve gotten used to spending? When you go all I know is you’re my favorite mistake.” -Sheryl Crow

I’ve made enough mistakes in my life to choke a horse. If you could lay them end to end they would be longer than a reclining Statue of Liberty. Sometimes I made so many mistakes in a row that I honestly couldn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. In fact, I would get so frustrated from making so many mistakes that I would be careless and make more mistakes. Some of my mistakes have been huge ones, and others have been relatively inconsequential, but every single one of them has been preventable. In fact, that’s in the very definition of the word…

mistake: an error in action, calculation, opinion, or judgment caused by poor reasoning, carelessness, insufficient knowledge, etc.

I particularly like that part about insufficient knowledge because it doesn’t mean that smart people don’t make mistakes. Even smart people are smart in certain areas and not so much in others. For example, Albert Einstein, pretty smart… in theories and mathematical equations. Put him on the street in Harlem and see how many mistakes he makes. See what kind of trouble he gets into because he doesn’t understand the lingo, the nature of the streets.

Some of my mistakes have fit into this paradigm very nicely and neatly, like the time I got on the wrong subway in Boston. I know the subway like the back of my hand, but the subway I’m familiar with is the Philly one, and Boston’s is just different enough, and the area just different enough, that I got lost for a good hour before finding my stop. Another time I made the mistake of asking a woman when she was due, and… she wasn’t pregnant. I call it foot-in-mouth disease, but that’s another mistake I created because I didn’t know. Continue reading “Favorite Mistake”