The Art of Making Mistakes

I had an art teacher once who said, when you make a mistake don’t erase it. Don’t erase it. Just make it part of your drawing.

Mistakes are inevitable when you’re traveling. You can waste a lot of time & energy trying to erase mistakes. Making expensive phone calls to indifferent officials, waiting in endless queues, filling out forms, looking for someone to blame, backtracking, cancellations, you know how it goes.

Or you can incorporate the mistake into part of the pattern of your journey. Weave it in, embrace it, add another line, add some color, step back and look at it with new eyes. Well? Still a mistake? Or something else?

Remember this the next time you board what you think is the bus to Narathiwat and end up in Bangkok. Or miss the last night train to Paris because you read the timetable wrong. Or lose your passport in a park and have to stay an extra week in Cuzco.

Turn those “mistakes” into doorways: doorways to adventure, courage, growth; doorways to the invisible future. Weave them into your story, into your drawing that looks like nobody else’s.

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