Oops

 

Mistakes, I’ve made few, but then again, too many to mention.  And more, much more than this, I did it any way I could figure out. 

            When people ask me how I’m able to make a certain piece of wood working, the only honest answer is, “A series of mistakes, randomly interrupted by moments of good fortune.”   I think the only difference between a person who succeeds at a craft, and one who doesn’t, is

the willingness to try.  Failure is not an option, it’s inevitable.  A completed project is the result of winnowing the number of mistakes down to a tolerable, and amendable, few.  Thus, making mistakes is not as important as knowing how to reorganize the flaws. 

            For this, the most important ingredient is humility.  When it comes to craft, we are all born sinners.  Accepting this is the road to endurance and faith that persistence, seasoned by patience and presence of mind, will see you through. 

            Some mistakes achieve an unexpected good.  We’ve heard about Velcro, Post-it notes and microwave ovens, but I have experienced a number of occasions when a colossal blunder resulted in a far better outcome.  This usually happens when I’ve made my intended effect impossible, so I’m forced to redesign the whole thing, turning a repair into a pleasing improvisation.     

Architects have known about this for a long time, probably because buildings are so big and take so long to put together that learning how to glorify a goof was an important strategy.   

            Not unlike building a novel.  I’m sure this is how many of you write.  Perhaps it’s the only way to write anything halfway decent. Anne Lamott’s shitty first draft is actually an exercise in dispensing thousands of mistakes that call for ingenious corrections.  Our most inventive writers are probably people who generate mistakes at scale, writing themselves out of one pitfall after another.

           

            The Grand Master of fortuitous mistakes is nature herself.  For every living thing, reproductive success is a numbers game.  The reason an individual produces far more eggs or sperm than needed to complete the transaction is it increases the odds for an acceptable match.  A byproduct of these multitudes is that little errors creep into the genetic scheme. It’s regrettable that the word “mutation” has a vaguely negative connotation.  Truth is, without mutation, we wouldn’t have evolution, since natural selection needs a toolbox of mis-made parts from which to select the preferred attribute for continued survival.   

If you really want to go large on the value of error, whatever existed before the Big Bang contained tiny quantum fluctuations, deviations from the norm.  This meant the universe didn’t start off perfectly configured, but instead, what cosmologists charmingly describe as slightly lumpy.  This meant that when expansion created the universe we ended up with galaxies, stars, and planets, one of which is our current residence.

            This is what I’d call a happy accident. 

            I’ve recently mentioned the delusion of perfectionism.  Nothing is perfect, and if it was, it wouldn’t do us much good.  It would just sit there in a smooth slab of static nothingness.  It wouldn’t grow, change, evolve or adapt.  This doesn’t mean there’s no point in trying to make things better. You just can’t make them perfect, and neither should you try.   

            Say what you will about the advanced technology we live with today, it mostly works.  It’s all pretty much based on quantum mechanics, which everyone applies, though no one really understands.   If you could boil down the unfathomable complexity of quantum theory, the remaining nugget would be probability.  Probably.  Outcomes are not predetermined, but rather the consequence of infinite, unknowable and evanescent interactions.  Heisenberg proved that “here and now” is ultimately an approximation. 

            This wouldn’t happen in a perfect world, but lucky for us, irregularity and imprecision makes the whole thing operational.  It’s been built into the system since the first nanosecond.  You might regret a mistake, but there’s no shame in it.  So have at it.  That’s why we have copy editors, imperfect as they are.