"A zen masters life is one continuous mistake." - Dogen
Some of us may feel the
same way and we’re not even zen masters…of course I’m not talking about
continuously blundering about like a fool, but just looking back at things… at
different points in our lives and thinking, “I wish I had done that
differently.”…or you know the old saying; “if I knew now what I knew then”…one
mistake can lead to circumstances that are like a deep hole that keeps growing
deeper…or making a river that has become too difficult or impossible to cross
and get back on the other side…other times it may just be a path that was
untaken and won’t present itself to us again…all because of one or two
decisions that were unfortunate…or it could just be that we look back at
several or many things and wonder how we could have misjudged things…badly in
some cases…woulda, coulda, shoulda, become regrets for lost opportunities…I
coulda done this if I would have only done that instead…I shoulda done that
instead of that…I woulda done this if
I only knew…etc…especially if we compare ourselves to the lives of others…of
course one shouldn’t hold a wake for past mistakes…what’s done is done…history
can’t be erased…we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves…it’s probably not healthy
for us to think about those things, yet one does think about those things from
time to time…when we look at our mistakes, we should do our best to learn from
them so we don’t make the same kind of mistake again…but we probably will…we
can’t help it, we’re only human…and humans make mistakes…we can’t hope to not
make mistakes in the future, for none of us are perfect…and if we think we are,
we are perfectly wrong…and on the flip side, not all mistakes turn out badly…or
we can turn them into ‘happy accidents’ as the painter Bob Ross used to say…so
mistakes aren’t an ‘if’ situation, their a ‘when’, but we have what we have in
front of us now and the wise thing to do is to make the best of it and do our
best to choose wisely in the future.
