Mistakes. Lots and lots and lots of glorious mistakes. Every day in every way I … make mistakes! Why so happy? Well, according to Lewis Thomas, one of my favorite authors, “Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules.”
If he has the right of it, people -- eternally unfinished and sloppy – are uniquely primed to create. Sometimes, that means resolving an argument or solving a practical problem. “Whenever new kinds of thinking are about to be accomplished … there has to be an argument beforehand.”
“…there can be no action at all if there are not the two sides and the argument. The hope is in the faculty of wrongness, the tendency toward error."
Cats, dogs, other animals – crystals, snowflakes, rocks – don’t have this “splendid freedom,” as Lewis defines it. “They are limited, most of them, to absolute infallibility.” What the absence of error creates or solves is, literally, nothing. Perfection is also death and stagnation. There is simply no moving forward or even sideways, no movement at all, without mistakes and lots of them. How very comforting.
"The capacity to leap across mountains of information to land lightly on the wrong side represents the highest of human endowments.”
Thomas, Lewis, “To Err is Human,” from Gross, John, “The Oxford Book of Essays.” 2008.
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