Mistakes

Yesterday I wrote that the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1919 and that was a MISTAKE.  It was not simply a typo—it was a mistake.  The Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918—one year before my mother was born, not one day after she was born.  What constitutes a mistake?  A “mistake” (noun) is “an action or judgment that is misguided or wrong,” an error, fault, inaccuracy, omission, slip, blunder, miscalculation, boo-boo.  When used as a verb, a mistake is simply  “to be wrong!”    I was wrong and inaccurate when I wrote that the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1919—and because of that boo-boo I shall probably always remember with great accuracy that the Armistice was signed in 1918.  Sometimes we learn from our mistakes, but not always.  

There is nothing wrong with making mistakes, but (as someone has written) we should try not to respond to them with encores.  George Bernard Shaw said it this way, “Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.”  To err is human.  Andy Rooney spoke of the “50-50-90 rule: anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there’s a 90% probability you’ll get it wrong.”  

When I retrace my journey of life, I become fully aware of how “mistaken” I have been about so many things along the way.  I’ve been wrong so many times.  I’ve goofed-up, miscalculated, slipped-up, blundered, and made many a boo-boo.  I am somewhat comforted by Dr. Seuss who wrote, “There are no mistakes in life—only lessons,” but somewhat disturbed by the fact that at times I didn’t catch on to the lesson.

We all make mistakes, but there are some who are unwilling to admit such blunders.  Some have a need to be right even when they are wrong.  This, too, is human, I suppose, but without confessing our mistakes, we never learn anything new.  The mistakes of the past unheeded, make for the same mistakes to be repeated.  Sometimes that is the price of the need to be right even when we are wrong.

Lunenburg, Nova Scotia