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Understanding mistakes
By Jim Murdoch
You're supposed to learn by your mistakes. Considering how many I've made in my life I should be a genius. I guess I must be making the wrong kind of mistakes. The thing I've found is that mistakes, errors, slip-ups, boobs, gaffes – call them what you will – only tend to provide us with a kind of negative knowledge about the world; we learn what not to do but not what we should have done and although that can be helpful in a practical way – e.g. don't put your hand over a gas ring, it'll hurt like hell – when it comes to relationships knowing what not to do is only of limited help. The thing about errors in science is that they obey rules. If you replicate the same conditions and do the same things then you'll get the same erroneous result over and over again. Life is not science though and people are not lab rats. What doesn't work with one person may be exactly what someone else appreciates. What I'm saying is that I'm not sure what use mistakes are in the grand scheme of things. My tendency has been to avoid making them and the best way to do that is to do nothing a lot of the time. From a scholastic point of view, making mistakes is all part of the game. In that respect you probably do you learn more from your mistakes than from your successes; you appreciate knowledge when you've had to struggle a bit to acquire it. What you learn is appreciation. The knowledge isn't any better because it's taken you that bit more effort to acquire it: 2+2 still only equals 4 no matter what way you look at it. Why do we make mistakes? I can think of a few reasons: we might not know the rules and even if we do we may not have all necessary facts available to us to make an informed decision; even when we have all the facts when we make that decision, we might still make the wrong choice or forget to do something. We use the word all the time but have you ever really thought about what the word 'mistake' means? It's a lot to do with expectations. A mistake is the end result of a process where the result is not what was anticipated. Unexpected does not equal undesirable through. Mistakes can lead us to some interesting, if unexpected, places: you turn left when you should have turned right and you find that book shop you never knew was there where you bump into that boy/girl you end up spending the rest of your life with. The key word in that last sentence is 'should'. Who says what should or should not happen? Some people say God but if that's the case then you get to blame God for all your mistakes to and the fly in that ointment is that, being infallible, God isn't supposed to make mistakes. I know what mistakes are. I can define them. I can write 600 words or so about them. I know that energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared but I don't pretend to understand it. Knowledge is only the first rung. Understanding is another thing completely. I don't understand for example why I keep making the same mistakes over and over again. What I really don't understand is why I knowingly and willing make the same mistakes over and over again. How many times really does a guy need to bang his head against a brick wall to know it's always going to hurt? |
The website of author Jim Murdoch
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