Mistakes

Not-optional

Dear reader,

I’m writing to you from space. It’s nice here. Saturn is sassier than I was expecting. Mars is a bit arrogant. Jupiter gives great advice. Mercury exudes mad scientist energy, so, we get along.

I feel like I’m flying, floating; something is happening inside. When is it not? My head feels like it’s on another planet. And my body feels tired.

I have too many eggs in my basket of eggs. There are simply too many. Some of them are cracking, spilling their insides over the other eggs, spoiling the whole basket. I have to remove some of the eggs. And I must stop adding eggs whenever I feel like it. Too many eggs is too many eggs. And we don’t want too many eggs. We want just the right amount of eggs.

The view from my writing spot

I don’t want to lie to you. I’m not actually in space. I’m in my writing spot, on the floral couch. I didn’t speak to Jupiter. I never met Mars.

I’m on Earth.

And the air outside is thick, warm. The basil plant is on its last legs. I seem to have overwatered it, which is unlike me. I never planted it. I’ll pray for a miraculous recovery, though, honestly? I’m not really bothered.

The good thing is that the poppy seedlings have emerged from the Earth. They’re precious things, really. There are four baby mint seedlings that have introduced themselves. The rest are still in hiding. And as far as the other seeds and pots go, I’m worried I’ll pick some of the seedlings, mistaking the babes for weeds. Or vice versa, I’ll encourage the weeds with love, attention, water, and sun, only for them to grow wickedly, taking up the space and using up the nutrients that were in fact meant for the seeds: carrot, courgette and whatever else I planted that I truly can’t seem to remember. I told myself to label them… but I didn’t. Alas.

My father is back in Italy for a few weeks. Today, at approximately 14:00, he gets back from the casale and parks his truck in front of the clothesline. He doesn’t like when I hang the laundry up outside. He says that it’s ugly; that it ruins the landscape. But it’s his laundry that I hung up to dry so that I could put my own laundry into the machine. Plus, the sun is out, so we may as well be efficient. I watch him curiously from the terrace with my sunnies on and my book in hand, eyes dotting from page to parent. He parks his furgone a few meters behind the laundry line, so as to account for however it is that the wind may or may not dance with the fabric. He opens the door to the furgone. He doesn’t say anything about taking the laundry down from here and hanging it up in the lavanderia. He just steps out, goes to the boot to grab something, goes to the right side door to grab yet another something, then slowly makes his way towards a hanging pillow case. I think his intention is to touch the pillowcase to see if it’s dry. So I wait for his hands to reach up and towards the fabric. But his hands do not reach neither up nor towards. No. He walks up to the light blue pillowcase as it gently sways and stops behind it, the pillowcase now lightly draping his face. He stays still like this for a few seconds, before emerging a moment later, laughing. Volevo sentire il profumo, he informs me. I laugh, too.

Do you remember the impressive climbing roses I wrote about a few weeks ago? Look at how impressive they are.

There is a part of me that hates myself for the mistakes that I’ve made. For the ones I keep making. I won’t sugarcoat it. How boring would that be.

I move through my days and there is a voice that interrupts incessantly: I hate myself. It announces it in bold. A reminder. A warning? Don’t have too much fun. No matter how good it gets, I can always crawl back to safety. I can always crawl back into the arms of this belief. I can choose it whenever I want to. It’s there, waiting.

I hate myself for not knowing what it is that I want until after I’ve done the opposite. But it’s strange. Where does my heart go when this something within me decides it wants to steer the ship? Can’t the two get along?

I fall into a trance, a pit of distraction, a seductive slingshot shot into a completely different direction; one I don’t want, one I’m not interested in, one I’ve already been to, one that I just spent all this time walking away from. And yet I fall for it (again). I think,

Yes!,
that’s it,
that’ll be it,
this is the thing to do,
this is the way to go,

But it isn’t. It never is. And I fall out of the trance pit slingshot, landing on my ass into a circumstance I wish I hadn’t created, only to have to accept the situation (again), be kind to myself (why should I), and decide, again, remember, again, clarify, again, what it is that I want.

No wonder I’m so exhausted.

Nevertheless, getting it wrong is teaching me a lot. Making mistakes that I deeply regret is teaching me to take deep breaths and to feel beyond / beneath the craving or aversion, beneath the desire and/or its opposite. I need the breath, I need to drink a hot tea and fall asleep in my butter-yellow hoodie in the sunshine for an hour, I need to say No often-but-not-always, and I need to speak as clearly as I can.

Each mistake I make brings me closer to understanding myself more deeply. To speaking the language of my inner world of feelings and sensations more fluently. To becoming well-versed in loving myself in the ways that I’d like to be loved. To getting to know the part of me that wants to love myself and wants to love others, and knows how to.

If I’ve made a mistake it meant there was something to learn. So I’ll do my best to learn it. And I’ll do my best to work with my Life as it is in order to create something beautiful, regardless of whether or not my past actions resulted in something I prefer or not. I can’t do anything about that now.

What I can do is say Oh, I fucked up, good to know.

What I can do is get wiser with any step taken.

What I can do is say to myself and Life: Homie. Thank you for showing me what it is that I truly want. Maybe next time we can figure it out through spaciousness. Maybe next time we can get closer to clarity without the pain of regret. Maybe, maybe, we can move forward with a bit more ease and a bit more efficiency.

I looked at myself in the mirror after I got back from a really pleasant evening with some friends. We went to a bar, we had a glass of wine, we went to another bar where we had dinner (and more wine); I had a torta al testo with erba and pecorino and I asked for harissa dip on the side, which was random but I saw it on the menu and it intrigued me. My friend David got a pizza and Gianfranco got a pita with various things inside. I offered some of the spicy-ish harissa dip to Gianfranco because I know he loves spice despite having only just met him a couple days ago. David and I shared the bottle of wine.

I looked at myself in the mirror after I got back from a really pleasant evening with some friends and I wondered,

Am I seeing myself clearly? Or am I hopping from one distorted perception to another? And might it be better if I stopped doing that? If I stopped hopping? If I stopped this hopscotching?

I don’t think all of the mistakes I’ve made have been completely wrong. I think due to my now concretised attachment to regretting, I tend to paint past experience through a narrow lens, one that says: I did the wrong thing, and what was correct was the opposite thing. But that’s not always the case. I’ve found that often the mistake-making was in fact born from a something stirring, a something shifting within me. A change would’ve been made, inevitably; it was birthing. Perhaps I birthed prematurely? Sure. I’ll admit to that. But does that make it wrong? Completely? Totally?

I’m not sure. I think the story is flawed if I’m perfectly honest. I think it tells only a tiny fraction of truth whilst the rest is all fantasy. And if that’s the case, let me enjoy it as such and let me create a fantasy of my own. After all, if that’s what we’re really dealing with, then the least we can do is make it fun.

If it’s all make-believe then I can choose whatever it is that I want to believe. In that case, I may as well perceive myself in a way that is useful. I may as well practise seeing through a lens that gets me up and dancing instead of keeping me frustrated and horizontal, stuck in a labyrinth of my own mind, stuck in a somewhere that doesn’t actually exist, but you’ll find me there, twiddling my thumbs and saying, Oh dear, I certainly wish I hadn’t done that…