I’m going to say a word and I want you to respond with the
first words that come to mind. Ready?
Ready… set… MISTAKE
Now,
if your mistake is a real ethical failure on your part – you betrayed your
spouse’s trust, you cheated or lied in some other way – do the Ready…. Set
again. This article is for the merely
boneheaded, not for times when you
betrayed your own soul. [Forgiving the
Unforgiveable by Flannigan is the way to go on this serious stuff.]
Did you immediately think about a mistake from your
past? Of course you did. Know that If you remember it as a mistake,
you haven’t forgiven yourself for it. If
it popped into your mind, it has been, in its own teensy or not-so-teensy
little way, dragging you away from having compassion for yourself.
I’ve been working on the self-compassion issue with clients
this year, as I see it as the cornerstone of most of the rest of what I
do. For all the “Oh, I wish I had taken
the other road” times of life, you end up with better choices in future if we
do the deep work with me that gets you to wrap yourself in compassionate forgiveness
and move on.
I’ve just been pole-axed by a blinding “aha!” that I have to
share. I KNOW you all that at least one
of these “mistakes” from the past.
So come with me on a journey. I’m teaching a class and answering a question
about some subject-specific vocabulary – and I realize that I am explaining the
Latin roots of the word, which entirely explains its function. Everyone is amazingly impressed. And the staggering reality hits me: I have been a whiz at science terminology,
including human anatomy [taught it at the college level for years], and a whiz
at English vocabulary AND IT’S ALL BECAUSE I STUDIED LATIN IN HIGH SCHOOL.
Latin?? Yup. Latin.
No, I wasn’t at seminary.
No, I wasn’t at seminary.
I dug in my heels and refused to listen to guidance
counselors or any other adult who tried to tell me that I needed at least 3
years of a foreign language to get into college. [Turns out they were right as far as that
goes. My two years of German got me the
snooty-disdain treatment from some colleges.]
What in hades was going on with me? Just me picking an unusual form of adolescent
rebellion?
Not really. What I
did was fall in love with a guy who had died nearly two millennia earlier. That’s right.
I was crazy-mad in love with Hannibal of Carthage and all things
Punic. In addition to book after book on
Carthaginian culture and the 2nd Punic War, I also insisted on
learning ancient Punic and Latin. I couldn’t
find any Punic classes anywhere but graduate schools, which weren’t available
to a 15 year old, however nerdy, but my school did have a classics track with
Latin language. So there I labored for
two years, slogging through the Gallic mud with Gaius Julius and his castra ponere and castra movere. [Caesar was
constantly pitching camp and then moving camp and leaving two cohorts behind to
guard the impedimenta, the baggage
train.] I would have committed total academic suicide and taken a 3rd
year of Latin but instead of military Latin they switched to Ovid’s love
poems. Yuk. So I trundled off to German, and my
self-study Russian.
Of course I consciously knew, through all the decades of my
life since high school, that the Latin study had made so much of English and
science much, much easier for me than it was for my cohort, but it wasn’t until
today that I understood down to my elemental DNA that Latin had been a very
good choice, a valuable choice and NOT A MISTAKE AT ALL. Really, truly, madly, it wasn’t a
mistake. It smoothed my path to my
eventual career. It enriched my class this week.
It was such a small thing, but watching that judgment
dissolve away to nothingness, to be replaced by shining sunlight, reminds me
yet again that even the most positive of us, even someone like me who is
dedicated to blasting through others’ barriers and bringing them more
productivity, more happiness, more of whatever matters most to them, is
carrying a Marley’s chain of regrets.
Today I let one of them go, with a laugh. God bless Latin. And bless all of your mistakes that you have
not yet realized were not so bad after all, and all of your non-mistakes that
have smoothed your way through life in ways you’ve never realized or
acknowledged. Pour gentle compassion on
them, hug the younger you that made those choices.
And I still love Hannibal and all things Punic…..
..........
Want to clear away the boulders that are standing in the way
of your goals? When Hannibal’s army was
stopped on an Alpine pass by a big boulder, he had his men build a large
bonfire and when the stone was very hot, they poured vinegar on it. The stone cracked into smaller pieces that
could be moved, and the elephants, horses and soldiers could get back on their
way to destiny. I can blast away your
boulders, too! Sign up for a FREE
Getting Unstuck session to get your transformation started. Victoria@soaringdragon.biz. www.soaringdragon.biz
