This isn’t really about football.
But. On October 25, 1964, a guy named Jim Marshall made a big mistake while playing football.
You see, Marshall played for the Minnesota Vikings. After recovering a fumble (that is where the other team drops the ball) against the 49ers in San Francisco, Marshall ran 66 yards. The wrong way. He picked up that ball and ran it into his own end zone. He wasn’t a rookie. No. Marshall was a four-year veteran. But in all the excitement, he believed he had scored a touchdown.
So there he was, down in the endzone, and in celebration, he did a little ditty and threw the ball out of bounds. Instead of scoring a touchdown for his own team, he had scored a safety for San Francisco. Bonk.
Despite Marshall’s error, the Vikings would go on to win, 27-22.
Marshall was a huge part of the Vikings’ famed “Purple People Eaters” defensive line. He played 20 seasons in the NFL. He was top-notch, too. In his career, he made 130 sacks. Also, he played in 282 straight games—one of the longest streaks in league history.
I’m giving you all those statistics because, despite a stellar career, Marshall became best known for his wrong-way run.
“It was tough when it happened,” Marshall told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 2015. “I took my football career very seriously, and to make a mistake, of course, it’s something that you don’t want on your resume. But mistakes happen.
After the game, his coach told him: “Hey, Jim, just forget about it.”
Mistakes.
Darn it. I’ve made a ton of mistakes in my lifetime. Some of them are little, insignificant things, that don’t register on the Richter Scale, in the grand scheme of things. Things like forgetting to put the screwdriver back in the toolbox. Or waking up a few minutes late on a work day.
Other times, they are slightly larger. But even still, they can fade away. Like scraping a fender on the light pole in the grocery store parking lot. Or missing making a payment on a loan balance or utility bill.
And then there are the colossal mistakes. If we are lucky, we never meet with these. But sometimes, sadly, we do. They are the kind of mistakes that stick with a person for a lifetime.
Mistakes. Like most things, they come in varying degrees.
Most people think we should “let them go.” Like Jim Marshall’s coach said: “Just forget about it.”
But should we?
Should we forgive ourselves when we’ve erred in a major way?
Take the for instance of the girl who was driving drunk, and hit the newlywed couple on their golf cart. She killed the bride and injured the groom. Should she just “forget about it” and forgive herself?
Or what about the kind of mistake that is made on a personal level? Making a poor decision about one’s own life? Do we just “forget” it?
I’m not very good at letting mistakes go. In fact, I don’t forget about them. They are called regrets.
Regret is a normal human emotion. Everyone experiences it at some point in their lives. I am leery of those people who say they have no regrets. I wonder if there is some kind of Android in their human container.
Anyway, regret can be caused by a variety of factors, such as making a mistake, missing out on an opportunity, or hurting someone we care about.
Trust me that I know. Regret can be a painful emotion.
But if we are lucky, and if we are able to see what needs to be seen, regret can also be a valuable learning experience. It can help us to identify our values and hopefully make better choices in the future.
Jim Marshall could never turn the day around when he ran the wrong way on the football field. But I can tell you for certain, he never made that same mistake, ever again, in his entire football career.
But our mistakes are our own. And our lives continue on with the fact that they are there, behind us or not.
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“Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.”
— Henry David Thoreau
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“If only. Those must be the two saddest words in the world.” – Mercedes Lackey
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“Don’t live your life regretting yesterday. Live your life so tomorrow you won’t regret today.” – Catherine Pulsifer
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Wrong way, Joe. Wait. I’m Joe.
