This morning, I was thinking about mistakes.
Every one of us makes them. It is a funny little thing about we humans. We are not perfect. We error. We are not always right. Heck, many of us, not even close. So yes, it is true. In our human form, we make mistakes.
The big question is. What do we do with them?
My Steelers are having a miserable year. For those of you who do not follow sports, the Steelers are a football team hailing from the great city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They play in the National Football league with 31 other teams. They are experiencing a season of woes, and as a fan of the team, I woe too. Wednesday’s child is full of woe. And here we are, full circle.
Anyway. The other night, they were playing the Cleveland Browns. Near the end of the game, there was a heated exchange between the players. I think it was way worse than “Yo Mama.” One of the Browns ripped the helmet off the head of the Steelers’ Quarterback, took a mighty swing at him with the helmet still in hand, and proceeded to crash it down on the Steeler Quarterback’s head.
If you saw any news the following day, you probably caught the film clip. This scene played out on every major station. It was ugly. But what thy didn’t show in the news reel were the 58 minutes that lead up to this skirmish. It also didn’t reveal all the games before, over all the years and decades, that went in to building the intensity of this rivalry.
The Brown’s player’s name is Myles Garrett. All the insiders say he is a nice guy. This is what he said, after he got cleaned up, and stood at the press podium, after the game.
From USA Today:
“Last night, I made a terrible mistake. I lost my cool and what I did was selfish and unacceptable. I know that we are all responsible for our actions and I can only prove my true character through my actions moving forward.”
“I know I have to be accountable for what happened, learn from my mistake and I fully intend to do so,” he added.
I didn’t want to write this entire thing about this incident. But there is more.
But before the helmet bashing incident, Garrett had been fined $50,000 for several penalties. The biggest came when he all-out notably punched Delanie Walker of the Tennessee Titans. And then, he got two roughing-the-passer plays on Jets quarterback Trevor Siemian, one of which ended Siemian’s season.
After those, Garrett said, “Yeah, usually I don’t let things like that get to me and I won’t let it happen again.”
And that is the tricky part about making mistakes, especially when we make them again, and again. What are we doing with them?
I make mistakes like crazy. Even those little things, that we’ve been doing for so long, and we should be incredibly certain of the outcome. Like chewing food. There are those occasions when we somehow blooper around and bite the inside of our cheek, or our tongue. How on earth do we manage that? We’ve been chewing since we were born. Even in the simplest measures, such as this one, we let our guard down, we let our imperfections slip in, and we foul something up.
Sometimes, it is big. Sometimes, small. But the main difference in the scale of mistakes, is our intent. Of course we never mean to bite the inside of our cheek. But how aware are we, when we hit someone in the head with a blunt object, in a fit of anger, an anger we’ve displayed on several occasions before?
If we error, we apologize. And then we try to learn. This is our good path. This is our way of recognizing our limited, defective, human selves, and making the world, somehow better. And although none of us will ever be perfect, we can certainly hold a perfect record for trying to grow, and learn.
For all of our mistakes, we can match them with good intentions. Good actions.
Good for us. Good for all.
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“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
― Albert Einstein
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“Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”
― L.M. Montgomery
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“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”
― Rita Mae Brown, Alma Mater
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