My son recently got back from a rain soaked week of Boy Scout camp. When I went to go pick him up, besides being disgusted by the smell of soggy pre teen boys, I was impressed that he'd toughed it out for a week under the 1960s type conditions. In fact, I think the camp has been relatively unchanged since the 1960s. The tents were canvas "A-frames", about 5 and half feet tall, with canvas 'doors' that don't zip shut. There are 2 to 4 cots per cabin, situated on a 1-inch tall wooden platform. When it rains, the water just flows under the little platform and the current carries the water through the tent and out the other side. When I say that everything my son brought to camp was wet, that is no exaggeration.
So we loaded up all that stinky, wet stuff in my car and we were off.
Driving home from camp, I was also quite impressed when he piped up, philosophically, "Mom, I made a realization yesterday." (He is not a very philosophical type. Though in my mother's heart, I harbor the secret hope that he is philosophical and just doesn't share that part with me).
He went on to say, "I've just realized that is takes a lot of blunders and mistakes before you get something right."
(Ah ha! I thought. Wisdom! This is a side benefit I was hoping he'd get from camp, in addition to leather-working). "Do you think you made blunders and mistakes this week?" I asked.
"Hundreds of them," he answered. "I just takes so many mistakes before you get a good system."
"What would you do different next time?" I asked.
"I'd zip my bag shut every time I opened it," he said. "Even if I didn't want to. Because I ended out with cockroaches in my bag."
That made me want to throw up, but he assured me that he'd killed them all. And I assured myself that not one item from camp would come in the house until it had been dumped on the back patio, any vermin killed and then the item would go straight to the washing machine or trash.
That all being said, I thought a lot about what my son said about blunders and mistakes over the past week or so since he got home. There is something both innocent and wise about knowing that life is just going to take a lot missteps on our part. It's nothing awful. It's nothing devastating to make a mistake. Just learn from it. Rework your system. Try a new system and maybe that will be a mistake too, but you can make some little change to that and try yet again.
As adults, we tend to fall into two camps: some of us take our mistakes really seriously and beat ourselves up for hours, days and weeks about them; others of us pretend we didn't make a mistake or blame somebody else for the mistake. I'd venture to guess that even people who seem to act as if they didn't make a mistake are really quite hard on themselves and that's why they're working so hard not to accept responsibility.
So maybe we could all gain from this practical/Boy Scout approach. Here we are everybody and we've got this life we're living We are doing are best. We really want everything to be good and right. But it's not always going to be. We're going to mess up. We're going to take the 'wrong' job, we're going to discipline our kids the 'wrong' way, we're going to make a bad investment, we're going to hurt someone's feelings, we're going to turn left when we should have turned right, we're going to judge someone unfairly. We are going to all of those things and more...sometimes.
Not all our mistakes are as obvious as cockroaches in our clothes, but if we slow down, ease up and know blunders and mistakes are just part of life, I bet that makes it easier to try again - do some little thing differently - and see what happens.
