One of the toughest things about life is accepting you’re not right all the time.
We have an easy time looking back on the past and admitting we’re wrong. We’re able to look weeks, months and years into the past and identify where we went wrong and why.
Looking at the present is harder. Because we are not right all the time, we know we are making mistakes in the present, here and now. But unlike mistakes in the past, we find it a lot harder to look at what we’re doing and identify what we’re doing wrong.
It’s a little disturbing, when you think about it. As we all go about our daily lives, every day, we’re making a million different mistakes. We’re making mistakes at work, mistakes with our health, and mistakes with the people we love, every day.
The right thing to do is fix our mistakes and do our best not to make them. But humans have limits. No matter how hard we work fixing our mistakes, there will always be a thousand more to take their place. At some point, we need to learn how to accept that we make mistakes.
This is something I struggle with a great deal. Sometimes I know I’m making some kind of mistake in the present, but I can’t put my finger on what. Something seems off. But everything appears all right, so I shy away from figuring out what it is.
Inevitably, when I do that, the mistake comes back to bite me in the ass.
The longer I shy away, the bigger the bite is. The bite is barely there when I acknowledge it as soon as I recognize it. For each day I ignore it, the bite gets bigger and bigger.
Wait long enough, and the bite can be big enough to ruin your life.
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