Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Mistakes.

One of the things that force you to reflect is when you make a mistake. It could be something you did unknowingly or something you did and then knew it was a mistake right away. Or it could be the kind of mistake you don't realize until you look back—and as they say hindsight is 20/20.

The mistakes that really make me think are the ones we make more than once. It is the mistakes we make and know we should not do it again, but chose to do so. Why?

I think sometimes it is for personal reasons. It might be a way to make ourselves feel better in the moment, but know the consequences will be felt after and that is something to not be concerned with at the present time. Maybe sometimes to prove something to ourselves or to others—prove we can do something or that we have the guts to make the wrong decision. Or sometimes we have no idea why we made that decision (and might not want to think about it), but we did it.

These mistakes, like the others, make us who we are...but is that who we want to be? Can we face reality and understand that who we are relies on what we do?

At times we all do things we don't necessarily agree with or believe are against our morals...but are they really if we do them? We become our mistakes even if we can't see it happening. Even if we rationalize and try to convince ourselves that it was a one time mistake or blame it on other factors...it was still our bodies and our minds making that choice in that situation, which is exactly what we wanted to do at that one single moment of time.

The challenge is then not to identify the mistake (because inherently I believe we all know our mistakes), but to find out why we did it and decide if that is who we really want to be…