Mistakes

I just want to take a moment to appreciate the art of making mistakes. Looking back on my life I see a vast plain of mistakes, like a field of wildflowers, each one unique in its own lovely imperfection. Leaving aside the mistakes I've made in my personal life, which are considerable though not egregious (I still have all my limbs, I'm not in jail, my teeth are in great shape), there is a panoply of horrendous performance mistakes that parades merrily through my memory.

A few choice recollections: the time I set my pants on fire, the time I ripped my pants up the crotch in front of 2,000 people while not wearing underwear, the time a toddler pulled down my pants while dancing in front of a wedding party, the time my fire bowl fell of my head and cut my lip, the time a zil went flying off my finger and landed in someone's soup, the time my toes got tangled in my fringe belt while doing floor work and I couldn't untangle them without sitting down on the ground and unwrapping them (for some reason that still feels like the most embarrassing, I blush just thinking about it), my Spinal Tap moment getting locked backstage and missing my cue, the time my wig flew off and landed in the audience, the time I had to run off stage to vomit, the time I ripped open my chin on my contortion table and bled all over myself, the time I got in a fight with a bunch of strippers who tried to push me off the stage, and the grand prize winner, the time I blacked out while in pretzel and summersaulted down off my contortion table to land neatly seated on the ground beside it, eyes slightly crossed, completely disoriented, unable to remember where I was or why all these well-dressed individuals were staring at me in various states of bemused horror.

At the time that each of these grievous miscalculations took place I was, of course, mortified. I wanted to disappear into one of those elusive embarrassment escape hatches that never opens up in the ground no matter how hard you pray. However, with the clarity of hindsight, I have come to celebrate my mistakes for two reasons.

First, people don't make mistakes when they are doing safe, predictable things they have done a thousand times. We make mistakes when we are experimenting, taking risks, trying something new and unexpected. I am compulsively drawn to the new and the odd, and like Dr. Moreau's creatures not all of my experiments turned out pretty. But I love the element of hazard in art, and there is so much to do in the world, so I'm glad that I have allowed myself the luxury of error.

Secondly, mistakes are essential to learning. We engage in our new and untried activity, and when it goes to hell in a handbasket we modify our approach, modify again, until we have learned something new. As long as we are always making new mistakes, then we get to learn the way children learn. They make mistakes all the time, quickly assimilating the consequences and adjusting future behavior. Therefore they learn much faster than us stodgy adults who are afraid of looking like wankers when we screw things up. Just keep making new mistakes, I tell myself, and at least I'll never be predictable.

Restraint

The hardest part of training for me is restraint. I push ahead, manically at times, without a healthy sense of my own safety or limitations. In all honesty this problem appears not just in my training, but in all aspects of my life, where I am prone to pushing too hard on the challenges I face and I run the risk of breaking something. Most often myself. How many times have I pushed myself too far, just to teeter on the brink of destruction? Why do I do it?

That question is particularly relevant now as I return to hard contortion training after nearly a year out, and still missing the ligament in my right hip. That hip is prone to tendinitis because it doesn't sit cleanly in the socket and the tendon rubs over my hip bone when I move. I know that I need to be careful with it, but in the moment when I am in the gym I lose track of my better judgement and I just want a higher stack of mats for my oversplits, a deeper backbend. More more more.

Why? I have finally figured it out. The true devil, the root of almost all destruction. Of course, it is fear.

If I don't push myself to my limits and beyond then I fear that I will never feel the bright light of the dream. I fear that if I don't do it now, right this second, that I will never be able to do it. The fleeting nature of my life in this body haunts me as I work with it, and I constantly suspect that if I don't squeeze every last drop of capability out of these muscles, bones, and tendons that I will lose them to age and death before I can satisfy the ravenous hunger that drives me forward.

Do all athletes feel this? I think it must be common, but I also think that the truly superlative movers in the world have found a way to overcome this fear and find a sense of faith in their bodies, and their destinies. For faith is the opposite of fear. If fear is the belief that your desires will never be realized, then faith is the belief that they will. Neither one can be proven for both are dependent in part on our own actions, and in part on so many things that are beyond our control. But choosing faith over fear, a daily choice, is what makes us able to flow forward, without pushing, into a place that is both inspired and healthy. I will try to choose faith today.