Fabulista Reflects: On Mistakes.

Everybody makes mistakes. Everyone. And if myths on divinities are to be believed, then even divinities make mistakes. But that’s a digression.

What mistakes can be described as is that they are “unfortunate accidents”. Yes, that’s right, “accidents” and not “incidents”. They are accidents of miscalculations on infinitely varying levels.

Like all accidents that we are familiar with, some of them end very badly. What is important about this necessary process of experience is that we learn from it.

Vases are nice to look at. We put them on a pedestal. They are safe, but they are not tested for strength. We assume them as the fragile things that they are. But sometimes, we accidentally knock them over their high pedestals and they lay broken in pieces.

What we can do with the broken pieces is, we pick them up and we try to fix them. We fix them where the cracks and fissures occur. We fix them where they broke. We reinforce along those lines and make them whole again. The vase is not the same anymore. It is now a vase that has experienced a great misfortune – with the cracks to prove it.

But when we reinforce along the cracks of the pieces to make it whole again, we also make it stronger there, along those broken lines. Hopefully, we won’t drop the vase anymore. But should we have an accident again, hopefully, when we drop the vase it will not be due to the same cause of accident nor would the vase break along the same lines.