Sebastian Onciu
One of the very few positive aspects of spending most of my time at home during this unfortunate year is the fact that I was able to dedicate more time to learning a new language, an activity I started last autumn when I decided to study Spanish and which I found so captivating that I have turned it into a habit by practising for at least half an hour a day mostly by using the language learning site Duolingo.
The main reason for which I am using Duolingo as my favorite language learning platform is the fact that their English to Spanish course is not only educational but also highly entertaining as it contains a significant amount of funny or thought-provoking sentences that make my daily routine of doing new Spanish lessons a lot more entertaining, therefore I have decided to take screenshots of those sentences I found really interesting and see if they can inspire me to write something such as a few reflections or stories based on them.
For the first article based on my Duolingo exploits I have chosen to reflect upon a sentence that shows a person’s resolution to live a life without mistakes. When I encountered this statement on Duolingo my mind instantly went to the New Year resolutions most of us take and then often break almost every year. The exclamation mark at the end of the sentence amplifies the person’s determination to always follow the right path and avoid all obstacles and temptations that may change the course of this road to perfection, and I would have nothing but admiration for such a person if I encountered one in real life, but is it really possible?
Can anyone live a life that is 100% virtuous, full of values such as kindness, generosity, compassion, and calmness all the time? Can that person stay away from any sort of vice or sin or even avoid using a bad word all the time? I highly doubt it, because we as humans cannot reach perfection since we have spiritual and physical limitations, and living a life without mistakes seems highly unlikely because we often commit mistakes involuntarily, and sometimes we do things wrong even when we have the best intentions.
For all these reasons I think that a resolution like I will live a life without mistakes sounds like a wonderful, but sadly unattainable ideal. Obviously perfection cannot be found in the limited world of humans, but elsewhere, above our power of understanding. Nevertheless, if the determination to reach this ideal can really help a person do some good things in life, such as giving up a bad habit or showing more empathy towards others, then living your existence trying to follow such an ideal will definitely help a person do things better. Making mistakes is part of human nature, but so is learning from them and using the knowledge we accumulate to improve ourselves!
I did think that I had made a mistake, once in my life, but then I later found that I was mistaken about that.
So, did I make a mistake here, or not?
If I am mistaken about my mistake, it is not really a mistake, or is it?
Are all mistakes like this?
Maybe there is no such thing as a mistake; we just do not realise why things happen, and everything can be explained perfectly, if we could dig deep enough into the situation.
So, ultimately there are no mistakes.
A mistake is just a mistaken label, that we attach to something, or to some process that we do not as yet fully understand enough to prevent us from making a mistake, which is not really a mistake anyway.
We are not smart enough to avoid mistakes, because we are not smart enough to understand why mistakes are happening, but they are not mistakes just all processes taking place, always explainable, if we could find out the reasons behind them.
Well, everything is relative in this world, so the concept of “mistake” is certainly debatable. Whenever we try to do something good, but the outcome of our actions is not the one we had anticipated we tend to blame ourselves and consider that things went wrong because of the mistakes we made, but I guess that if we analyze our actions and the whole context that led to that unfortunate result we realize that there is a multitude of factors which may have derailed us from the expected course and which led to an unfortunate outcome, so I think you’re right, there are no mistakes, there are just actions we perform that may trigger a chain of events whose consequences might be the opposite of what we had expected.
Ha, ha. I must have put up a good argument there.
You ended up agreeing with me. I didn’t think that you would.
It is a philosophical argument, of course, as when we do make a mistake, it certainly treats us as if it was a mistake, but if we could see, that really, it was something that we didn’t allow, for somewhere in the chain of events leading up to the “mistake”, as you said, there really are no real mistakes, just miscalculations, or not seeing deep enough into processes.
I don’t think there is a man without flaws. We also make some mistakes in life.
We surely make mistakes, nobody’s perfect, and frankly, if people were perfect, life would be a lot less interesting!
Yes, we learn for as long as we live.
We all have to learn in life as we make our way through.