Making mistakes
finding the gold in the shadows
If you stumble, make it part of the dance.
Helen Bonham Carter on Bella Freud’s excellent Fashion Neurosis podcast.
I normally pride myself on being “on it.” I don’t often make mistakes; in fact, I am hyper-vigilant, checking things twice, ensuring I don’t make a mess or a misstep. But recently, things have felt off kilter; the balance is skewed. I have been making mistakes.
It has got me thinking about when things go wrong, and it is our fault. Children are encouraged to make mistakes, make a mess, fall down and then pick themselves up and carry on. In fact, we celebrate their snafus- that is how they learn! But grown-ups? Not so much. We are expected to be error-free, always. It seems unfair, considering we are all still growing up. It is not something that just ends one day, and we leap out of bed and yell out of the window, “Here I am! All grown up! I did it!”
One of the biggest things I offer to my coaching clients is to slow down. Take a pause, take a breath. Consider carefully before decisions are made, and things are said. Of late, I have not taken my advice. My mistakes stem from my moving too fast, scurrying through days and weeks at speed. Minor, really, but silly and costly. Forgetting to include an essential document in a passport application, ordering the wrong size shoes, breaking a favourite bowl, misplacing some paperwork, and missing a deadline. I called a handyman to come and retrieve a gold ring from a sink pipe, only to discover that it had fallen into a basket. I paid him with both my embarrassment and hard-earned money.
Walking home on a sticky Singapore day under a brilliant blue sky and a bruising sun, I was listening to Helen Bonham Carter, interviewed by Bella Freud. She said something that struck a chord-I started this essay with it. I stopped and replayed her words. Then I wrote them down. If you stumble, make it part of the dance. Little would she know how relevant her words are. She has gone to the heart of the matter- it's what we do with the stumble. How can we make it a mistake part of the dance?
The Japanese (of course, they do) have an entire philosophy that makes beauty out of calamity. It is called Kintsugi, also known as Golden Joinery. It is the art of repairing broken pottery by highlighting cracks with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. Rooted in the philosophy of wabi-sabi (finding beauty in imperfection), it treats repair as a vital part of an object's history rather than something to disguise, making broken items more beautiful and treasured, becoming a metaphor for resilience and healing. And the repair is made visible, not hidden in shame, it celebrates imperfection and accepts flaws, maybe even finds peace in the broken parts of life. Repair becomes a golden thread, not hidden, not regretted. Like a scar, it becomes a part of our story, visible, not hidden. In a world that celebrates beauty and perfection, Kintsugi reminds us that mistakes can be made beautiful.
I have a favourite t-shirt that is so worn, it has tiny holes all over it. Rather than discarding it, I took it to the tailor and asked them to repair all the holes with hot pink thread. I like my t-shirt even more now.
How can an error be a doorway towards something better?
As always, I turn to art, to nature, to stories. Surely, something can be created from a mistake?
Here are a few things I learned:
Fleming's failure to clean his petri dishes properly led to mould contaminating his samples — and that contamination turned out to be penicillin, one of the greatest medical discoveries in history. A mistake that saved hundreds of millions of lives.
The recurrent laryngeal nerve in giraffes takes an absurdly long detour down the neck and back up again — a remnant of our fish ancestors, where the nerve's path made perfect sense. It works, but it's gloriously inefficient.
The Scottish attempt to colonise Panama in the 1690s (the Darien Scheme) was such a disastrously miscalculated venture that it wiped out a huge portion of Scotland's national wealth and was a major factor pushing Scotland into the Act of Union with England in 1707 — reshaping British history entirely.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa is perhaps the world's most famous architectural blunder. Construction began in 1173, and the soft soil on one side caused it to tilt almost immediately — yet that very tilt is the reason millions of people visit it today.
When Michelangelo was carving his David, he was working with a block of marble that had been partially botched by a previous sculptor. He turned those constraints into one of the most celebrated sculptures in history.
A four-leaf clover! The four-leaf variation occurs due to a genetic mutation, essentially a small copying error during the plant's development. Nature made a mistake, and we made it magical.
That is the thing about mistakes. We need to own them, apologise, forgive ourselves and then look around to see how we can repair. The repair is where discovery lies. What might come from this? At the very least, maybe I will learn to slow down. Snail pace over road runner. Maybe we learn to take ownership of ourselves, faults and all. We can’t hide the part of ourselves that is imperfect, too quick to act, to flare up in anger, to make mistakes. As Jung said, these are our shadow selves- the parts of ourselves we reject, hide. Jung was clear: Integrating rather than suppressing those parts was, for him, the path to wholeness. The gold is in the shadow.
Leonard Cohen famously spoke of the cracks being the places where the light can get in, where something new can enter. Seen this way, mistakes, big or small, are not an ending but a threshold towards something new. It might be a willingness to repair rather than discard, and what we return to after the failure may be richer for the journey. Once the wildfire has destroyed the field and forest, what is left is richer, more diverse, vital and ready for renewal.
In this shimmering watercolour, Turner offers us golden light, a light so bright that with one stroke he has rendered the horse and cart, people and buildings hazy. It is the gold light that strikes us- cascading light, gold his subject.
As an optimist, I am trying to find the gold in the shadows and permit myself to have a season of mistakes. When things break, there is always something that remains.
p.s this essay is a day late because I was repairing a mistake.
Thank you for reading. Please make my day and indulge the algorithmic gods by tapping the heart button if you enjoyed this. It helps people find me. Sam x