The Green Wave

I woke up thinking about mistakes because – well, you guessed it – I’ve made a spate of ‘em recently.  At a concert on Friday night, I bungled some harp parts.  I tripped over a wire.  I forgot an important (and funny) detail in a story I told.

Was the performance ruined?  No, it wasn’t.  And did I do do other things well?  Yes, I did.  But what woke me up this morning?  The memory of my mistakes.

I make mistakes all the time, but only some of them rankle.  In my Irish classes, I regularly forget a word or mess up a spelling.  As a writer, I occasionally revisit my essays or poetry and find something that is over-written or factually wrong.  In my performing life, I miss notes, chords, words, and even whole verses from time to time.  But many of these mistakes are easy to laugh off, excuse, or forget.

So why do some mistakes feel so important?  Why do some of them char into memory and leave that awful burned smell in the mind?

I recognize the big-deal variety by the kinds of things I hear in my head:

• I should be past that by now.
• I should have known that.
• I can’t believe I did that in front of her.
• Now they’ll think they wasted their money.
• Now they’ll know I’m nothing special.

The killer mistakes – or the ones we allow to turn into killers – are rooted in shame and vulnerability.  We feel we should have known that fact, or that we should be beyond getting so rattled by a funky microphone, or that a really good musician doesn’t make such slips.  From there, it’s only a short step to:  “I know less than I should know.  That means I only appear to be an authority.  That means I’m a fraud.  That means that I’m deceptive.  That means that I’m worthless.”

Ouch.

The other kind of mistake is more like a sneeze than a deadly virus.  I recognize them when I hear these things in my head:

• Well!  That was silly!
• Gracious, I’m just tired tonight.
• Oh, well, I didn’t hear her right is all.
• Oh!  Now I understand!  They wanted this and not that.  That’s easily fixed.
• No biggie.  Anyone could forget a thing like that.

These mistakes seem unattached to me somehow.  They are simply a part of the weather – external, natural, changing, neutral.  I don’t take them to heart.  Yes, they are often smaller (like missing a single letter in an Irish word, as opposed to forgetting a pivotal concept), but they don’t touch my self-respect or my notion of myself as competent and worthy of people’s trust.

So the big difference between the ranklers and the non-ranklers is my own idea of who I am and who I should be.  Like so many things, this is a story I tell and a style I choose for telling it.

I could tell a new story about a woman with a huge thirst for life who takes on millions of creative, artistic, and scholarly projects.  I could say that this thirst for life is more important than being right all the time.  This desire to use all the gifts and try out the wings and test the skills necessarily means there will be some mistakes and failures.  I could gently pry away the shadow of shame by respecting the attempt more consciously.  I could re-imagine mastery as a fluid process, rather than as a static destination.  I could decide that mistakes are the buds that flower into something new.

Even as I sometime writhe over my mess-ups, I’ve always believed it important to live a life marked as much by mistakes, attempts, and experiments as by success, achievement, and mastery.  Otherwise, one’s tenancy on Planet Earth is rather dull and uneventful and we never even try to use all the fantastic equipment we came with.  Living that way is like falling out of an airplane and refusing to pull the parachute ripcord because it might not work.  There are many things worse than failing.

Not failing, it turns out, is one of them.

And since I’m in no danger of that, I’m a success!