Error is not the obstacle, it is the path itself

January 13, 2020 11:54 AM

Chambers once preached that the reason people fail is because they are ignorant of the way they are made.

Which is certainly true, but it’s not the only reason.

People also fail because they are insistent on being the way they are, even when it doesn’t work. They may say that they want to change. And they may even take small measures to do so. But it’s mostly a performance. It’s a defense against a difficult truth about themselves they’d rather not entertain.

Think about it, why burn calories doing the hard work of changing when we can simply reach into our briefcase of bullshit and eloquently justify staying the way we are?

Schulz, in her humbling book of adventures in the margin of error, reminds readers that although to err is human, most of us go through our lives assuming, and sometimes insisting, that we are right about nearly everything, from the origins of the universe to how to correctly load the dishwasher.

But error, she says, is not the obstacle in the path toward truth, it is the path itself. Whereas being right rarely teaches us who we really are.

And so, instead of pointing fingers and grilling each other, as if to say, what is your major malfunction numb nuts, let us wonder aloud with each other from a place of compassion and curiosity.

Is it possible that this is something we can and should change? What if the way we were was something that could be changed for the good of all, ourselves included?

Remember, all change is interpersonal. It’s driven by the interactions between people, rather than by people themselves.

And it all starts with ability to accommodate ourselves to wrongness.

Instead of struggling in vain to make the world stay the way it was.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…