Learning from Mistakes: How Every Choice Brings Us Closer to Ourselves

It’s a shame that we have come to demonize wrong choices, missed opportunities, and the “wrong” path. Because every choice — whether it turns out to be right for us or not — is far more valuable, in our search for happiness, than inaction and indecision.

Because every “wrong” choice has something to teach us. It shows us one more thing we do not want on our path, in our life. One more of the thousands of possibilities this life offers that we can now remove from the table with greater certainty — because we have lived it.

Of course, it is difficult to go through one “wrong” choice after another, feeling as though nothing truly fits us, as though nothing fills our soul with that sense of beauty we only seem to hold as an image in our mind.

But in truth, no choice is entirely wrong. Every choice is right in its own way: some teach us what suits us, while others reveal what wears us down, so that we may recognize it and avoid it as much as we can.

Some of us simply learn more slowly than others. Or we become so afraid of making yet another wrong choice that we freeze, hesitating to change anything in our lives.

And that is a pity.

Because life can be generous to all of us — as long as we continue to seek well-being. Love. That one choice which, when it comes, allows everything to begin falling into place.

The choice that will give meaning to the path we have walked so far.

All it takes is the courage to first be honest with ourselves, to stand firmly on our own two feet, and to claim what we truly want.

And then, to commit to that choice — to devote ourselves to it wholeheartedly, even if in the end it turns out to be yet another lesson.