Mistakes

This evening while we were cooking dinner Zoe randomly says to me, "Mommy, I'm nocturnal". Then she added, "you're nocturnal, too."

Well that certainly explains a lot. All these 15+ years I've been dealing with insomnia, I've had it all wrong. I'm not an insomniac, it's just that I need to be sleeping during the day. My mistake.

Today I've been thinking about mistakes. Being over analytical and self critical I tend to focus a good amount of energy going over mistakes that I've made. From an intellectual point of view I understand that no one is perfect and that making mistakes is what it is to be human, but I've had a difficult time applying that kind of leniency to myself. Something clicked today. Lately, I've been reading books on positive/gentle disciple and one common thread is to allow your kids to make mistakes without shaming them for it because it's part of the learning process.

It's also a major component in the creative process. Without mistakes how can we create new ideas, art, concepts, paradigms, inventions, anything?

Zoe, Paige and I were on our way to the fabric store to get some fabric for Zoe's Halloween costume; she's going to be a Monster Catcher. I decided to see if I could discover a way from point A to point B with just a general sense of where I was going. The fabric store is located just north of where two major freeways intersect so the roads are all screwy in that area. It took us about 20 turn-arounds but we finally made it there. Zoe thought it was great fun to see me making some many wrong turns, and it really was fun. My mental map of Austin has expanded.

I'm on a mission to take the "bad" out of mistakes, and keep life playful.

Picture of the amazing vegetable biryani we made tonight