When my mom was little she was playing near my grandmother (her mother) while she was ironing clothes. My mom was being nettlesome and kept trying to touch the iron and my grandmother kept telling her no. “You’ll burn yourself.” In spite of the warning my moms little arm kept darting out attempting to touch the flat shiny silver bottom of the iron. Finally my grandmother gave up and let her touch it. And she burned her finger. She didn’t say I told you so. The pain was enough for my mom to understand.
My mom told me that story a long time ago and I came back to it today because I’ve been thinking about mistakes. Yesterday I made a mistake at work. It was embarrassing and frustrating and I beat myself up about it. But when I stepped back from my feelings I realized that I learned something and the gift is that I’ll never make that mistake twice.
As much as we may want to be shielded from mistakes or to protect others from the pain of making them, it’s sometimes better to allow people the space to make their own decisions. To be wrong. To feel angry or sad or frustrated as a result. Like my grandmother allowing her daughter to touch a hot iron, even though she knew it would burn her fingers, we have to allow ourselves to fail. To get burned. And to learn.
It’s not pretty. And often painful. But we can grow from our mistakes. Be better than we were the day before. We don’t necessarily need to go around touching hot irons all the time. But when we do get burned we need to give ourselves the grace that we can’t know it all, but we can learn and get better.
