Not long ago, I made a big mistake. I won’t say what it was. What matters is that it was the kind of mistake that stops you in your tracks and makes your stomach drop. It resulted from a brief lapse in memory, possibly connected to a medication change, but any cause or contributing factors didn’t make it feel any smaller. A mistake is still a mistake, and the responsibility is still mine.
I’ve spent my life around people who make mistakes. I’ve sat with them as a counselor, as a martial arts teacher, and supervised them both as a probation and parole officer and as a probation and parole supervisor. I’ve told a lot of people that mistakes are how we learn. It’s a different thing to be the one standing in it and living with the consequences.
Here is what it taught me:
It taught me about myself. I found out how I respond when I can’t blame anyone else. The first instinct is to build a defense. The better work is to sit still, own it, and ask what it’s trying to show me. The Choctaw way has never treated a person as separate from the consequences of their actions. You look at what happened, take responsibility, and carry the lesson forward. Shame doesn’t help with that, but honesty does.
It taught me about others. People respond to a big mistake in very different ways. Some showed me grace. Some showed me judgment. Some with a little of both. Thank goodness that not too many people knew about my mistake. How a person treats someone who has stumbled will tell you a great deal about them. It also tells you what kind of person you want to be when the stumbling is somebody else’s.
It reminded me that life is a teacher. Not always a gentle one. Yet, the lesson usually comes when we’re ready for it, or when we’re not ready and need it anyway. Some say that the obstacle is the way. My ancestors would have said it more simply: pay attention. The Great Spirit (or whatever you call it) speaks through life events – through whatever happens to us, and that includes the hard things.
Life also gives us small gifts, and I don’t want to skip past that.
On a camping trip not long ago, I found feathers on the ground. I didn’t go looking for them. They were just there, waiting for someone to notice. Some may have came from some unwelcome event which to the bird who lost these feathers. I picked them up, carried them to my tent, and now they’re on my western hat. Every time I put it on, I’m reminded of that day, of life providing things to us, and of being out in the woods where things make sense.
That’s the balance I keep coming back to. Life hands us the hard lessons and the little treasures, sometimes in the same season. One teaches us humility. The other teaches us to keep our eyes open. I’m grateful for both.
So here’s where I’ve landed: Make your mistakes honestly, and own them fully. Learn what they have to teach you: about yourself and the people around you. Also, keep watching in front of you as you walk, because you never know what’s waiting there for you to discover.