I know the feeling. You want to stop everything you’re doing, turn around, and run as fast and as far as your feet will carry. Run away from your mistakes. Create some distance between you and your failures. I think this is a natural feeling. After all what would it make us if we enjoyed and craved to be utter miserable schmucks. So it’s perfectly understandable to want to run, but to experience change and something completely new, you have to stay.
Staying is not easy. No matter how large or small your error, be it clerical or a relationship type, staying has far wider application and possibilities. I don’t mean to stay in an abusive relationship. I don’t mean not to lend large sums of money to your best friend. When I say you have to stay, I mean you have to avoid running away from yourself and the problem, and trying to burry it like a thief.
We try really hard to distance ourselves, but also to bury any signs or indicators of mistakes. This is often very exhausting because the bigger and the longer the mistake the more things there is to bury and destroy. But there is a better stance, and no mouthing everything happens for a reason does not spring to mind, even though philosophically everything does happen for a reason, but lets stay with the task at hand.
You should stay.
No matter how uncomfortable the mistake. No matter how hurtful the regret. No matter what, you should embrace it, instead of running and hiding from it. The problem is that we try to find validation in others. We play a little game where inch by inch we try to turn the earth like Superman and either justify or forcibly change the past.
Let the past remain in the past and let the future take care of yourself. What’s left to be done is to repair anything that can be repaired if you happen to be the one that broke it. Take a look at what went wrong and why it went wrong. Try to learn how to see signs of things going wrong again. Mend your house after the hurricane. Make it stronger and better, and continue living, not forgetting, but not needing to remember.
If a world leader is allowed to say so many horrid things each and every day, that the sheer volume, negates the ability to discuss and do anything about any of it, you are more than capable of not needing to remember. You are very capable of staying, of not running, of owning your life, and not looking for avenues of escape.
There is no escape. There is no where to hide. Our mistakes are legendary as people. Thats’s why we read great works of literature and can’t say enough about theatre and the cinema.
Own your shit and don’t carry the stench of others with you.
You will probably run but catch yourself when you know you’re running. You will hide but do summon the courage to come out and show yourself.
Stay.
Don’t hide from yourself or your mistakes.
Stay and love yourself.
Cover photo generously provided by photographer Brock Dupont via unsplash.com
