Mistakes; we all make them. Goodness knows, I have had my fair share. Some have been fairly minor. There was the time I didn’t look in my rear view while backing out of the driveway and ended up smashing the hood of my sister’s car with our SUV. Oops! Others have had much heavier reprocussions. Choosing the wrong undergrad major, staying in that major, picking a career that I dispised, and wasting 5 years of my life seems to come to mind as one of my more major life altering fuck ups. After every mistake, no matter how big or small, I always sort of hit my palm to my forehead and think, “Man! I wish I didn’t do that! I wish I could go back in time and change that decision.” But the thing is, I can’t. Nobody can. We can’t ever wind back the hands of time and alter our past. As much as we might want to, life just doesn’t work that way.
Lately I seem to find myself in a tangled web of regrettable decisions. Desicions that I fear may haunt me for a long time to come. I keep finding myself thinking “if I would have only done things this way, maybe this outcome would be different?” or “why did I make this choice?” When this happens, I keep having to remind myself that life is like a river. It is fluid, yet it only flows in one direction; down stream. Things happen for a reason. Mistakes happen for a reason. They are life’s way of teaching us lessons, and it is our job to learn from them. If we don’t, we create a dam, we become stagnant, and our river goes nowhere.
So here is to my mistakes, both big and small! I made them, I own them, and I will learn from them. Let the river flow on.
