Our Wonderful Errors

Transcript

Welcome beautiful thinkers!

I was thinking of our wonderful errors.

A few weeks ago, I went to the tianguis in Santa Tere, to the flea market, well, one of them, there’s actually two on Sundays.

And I went down the street, down Nicholas Romero, in the neighborhood where I live and ordered some tacos, the barbacoa, this delicious tacos that they make there.

And I ordered three or four soft shell tacos, soft shell, is a funny word.

So, but tacos with soft tortillas.

And I’m speaking in Spanish.

Now the normal way to say this is: your order “tacos blanditos”, “soft tacos”, right?

As opposed to “tacos dorados”, “golden brown tacos”.

But instead of saying tacos blanditos I said, “Tiernos, por favor”.

Like “tender tacos”, which is a strange thing to say.

Sometimes, if you order eggs, you can say, “huevos tiernos”, “huevos estrellados tiernos”.

“Eggs, sunny side up, soft or runny yolk?”

Right?

But I then made the mistake of saying “tender tacos” instead of “soft tacos”.

Which doesn’t make a lot of sense, even though the words are quite similar.

I’ve thought about that.

I thought this is interesting.

The word being a synonym came so easily to my mind, is shown through the error, through the class of error that I made, it demonstrated my fluency to myself.

And I thought, “Oh, this is interesting.”

The word came to mind so easily, even though it’s the incorrect word, still a synonym.

And therefore it affirms how well can I speak this, this language.

My second language.

I wondered about other types of errors that we make.

Surely there are a lot of errors that we make.

And we might be hard on ourselves.

To think, you know, that was embarrassing, I said the wrong thing. made this faux pas.

Or even something grand.

Maybe we planned an event and only a few people show up, who knows?

All kinds of things that we might feel silly or embarrassed about or even ashamed, guilty.

The kind of situations which we wouldn’t have gotten ourselves in just a few years or months before because we weren’t that daring or that experienced to be in that situation.

Now, we have grown.

Now we are in these new situations.

And we find ourselves facing these things which we didn’t entirely expect errors that we make.

Really indicate how far we have come.

There’s another example which is, uff, is still a bit tender for me actually.

Was a long time ago, maybe 15 years ago and I was working as a door to door salesman.

And through doing so many door to door sales had developed my confidence.

I was no longer the shy 19 year old.

Now being 23 had a lot of confidence, though perhaps not fully rounded out at the edges, perhaps I had more confidence than I fully know what to do it.

So, one day I nearly got into a fight.

These young men had somehow provoked me near the train station.

And I ran across the road, about to strike one of them.

Instead, they struck me.

Fortunately, I wasn’t very injured.

And soon afterwards, I mean, I hadn’t talked to these lads before.

And I said, “Wow, okay”.

I became more aware of how crazy this situation was.

And I apologized.

I said, like, “Guys, I’m sorry, I don’t want to fight you.”

And we managed to deescalate the situation from there.

But I don’t think I’ve ever told anybody that story.

Because I was so ashamed of it.

So ashamed of my own behavior.

And then I would lash out like that, that I would allow myself to lose control.

And I felt quite strange for the rest of the day.

Like I said, I felt tender.

I felt ashamed and humbled, I suppose.

I felt, perhaps like I was on the verge of tears.

On many points during the day, when I spoke to my customers, I spoke to them softly and gently.

And authentically.

I was relieved when anybody, any customer was kind to me that day.

Once again, just a few years before that, I would known have had the courage, the confidence to run off the road and prepare to strike someone like that.

Now we gain these new abilities, and we gain this confidence, this faith in ourselves.

There’s something like a powerful drug, we have to know how to handle it.

And we are going to make some mistakes, we’ll make errors as we go, as we grow.

Because we are growing and maybe there is nothing to be ashamed of.

Maybe this is a blessing.

If we make these errors, yes, we correct them.

We do what we can to get back on track.

Take a deep breath, control ourselves.

And thank the Lord that nobody was seriously injured that day.

You know, all that happened was I received a blow on my face.

And everybody was well and even our friendships lasted.

Occasionally our errors will be more grave.

They must be, occasionally.

Because now we’re playing at higher stakes.

We’re playing games that we never thought we would enter.

Now we are exploring new worlds, new forms of being.

Now we are being something which we have never been.

Occasionally somebody might get hurt and again, we correct.

And hopefully we repent for our mistakes and try again.

I was revealing some of my photos on Instagram the other day.

And there was this quote from some spiritual master.

Written this poem that was engraved at the caves outside of Kuala Lumpur.

And it says, “What happened was good. What is happening is good. What will happen is also good”.

We question ourselves so much.

That yes, we are mortal, we are human, there are limits to the extent of our knowledge, and our self knowledge.

As long as we are growing, we are going to make mistakes.

And thank God that we make mistakes.

And thank God that we correct them.