Making Mistakes

Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)

People have come to some conclusion that to make a mistake is ... a mistake, often with dire consequences. This is true because so much of today's world takes any mistake, slight, or emotionally driven perception and make it into something catastrophic. This is bad; very, very, very bad. 

Mistakes are those tools, if you survive, that teach us how to do better so we can - survive! The end game here regardless is survival and the only way we can achieve those goals is by what our elders teach us because they survived. The stuff that our elders cannot teach us deals with what happened then vs. what happens now as evolutionary progression dictate, i.e., back then it was lions and tigers and bears but today it is our fellow humans who may take you down at work, a relative taking you down at a family function or a predator taking you down in a quiet, secluded and safe second location. 

Today, we have more opportunity to learn from the mistakes we make yet today, especially this emotionally charged leftist type belief, we tend to take emotionally changed homage to what one person may have done, by mistake, and make it into a jail sentence, job loss, and economic catastrophe because they made this one mistake. 

No one, it appears, takes the full story into consideration such as what they did before and how they act and behave after. Everyone makes mistakes, often very small and seemingly insignificant ones, and sometimes larger mistakes. We try, convict and sentence simply because that mistake may have tripped our emotional monkey brain causing us to be angry and disgusted but that is not fair, we owe it to all concerned parties to get the full monty story, espoused to the appropriate authorities, and have faith that the mistake will be a learning tool to make things better. We DO NOT LIVE in a UTOPIA! Never happen and never will because ... wait for it ... WE ARE HUMANS!

In the martial arts and karate for self-protection/defense we all will make mistakes and we all hope those mistakes are made in the training and practice we do but if we make some mistake in actually protecting and defending what matters are two things. First, is do we freeze at the junction of that mistake? If we do then that is a mistake that needs to be rectified immediately. Second, when the mistake occurs do we actually move on without hesitation? If we do, that is a good thing because our objective to stop the damage and escape/evade continues unabated regardless, we move immediately and without hesitation to the next principled methodology to get-r-done. 

You cannot achieve those objectives unless you make mistakes and learn from them. In the protection and defense of self, for instance, something failed catastrophically but you survived. The most dangerous of mistakes to make is self-blame. Instead, use the mistake to learn because, after all, you survived and those who survive continue to do so because they learned, studied and created something better for the next time from that mistake. 

In karate, one mistake often not recognized is thinking that the traditional standard technique-based defenses taught actually work. Granted, they may but then again they may not. In this my efforts are to point out possible "glitches" so that those who are relying on their training for self-protection can achieve a "knowing" and "understanding" and "belief" that they are correcting that mistake. 

Make mistakes, sure, embrace them as teaching tools, you betcha! Making even a single mistake is merely a means of learning, creating and evolving all the while successfully "surviving!"

Note: this is my article based on what I read in the material below, always - ALWAYS - fact check me by utilizing the bibliography/references I provide before deciding on its validity - good or bad.

Bibliography (Click the link)