Shoulda Coulda Woulda (inspired by one hitRECord episode)

I should have gotten that little gold ring with the mint-colored stone in it instead of that silly little dress.  That way I can wear it more often.

I think about all the things I could have done better during our last trip, but the honest truth is I don't think I know enough now, still, to have thought of anything better.

And of every one thing we do wrong, we do a hundred right.

So of, say, five decisions I wish I could redo, I'm forgetting the five hundred good ones.

But life's like that, isn't it?  We're constantly learning and growing; and how do we learn and grow if not from our mistakes?  So we focus on them.  We keep telling ourselves – if we were even aware enough to say this – this time I’m going to get it right!  And we do mean it sincerely and with the utmost conviction.  But how can we expect a better turnout if we didn’t know exactly where we’d gone wrong to begin with?  In better circumstances, maybe.  Tough luck, perhaps.  I thought I’d done everything right just to realized I had it all wrong!  And then what do you do?  You try, try again.  Under different circumstances.  With better luck this time. 

Pretty Tally Marks

Perhaps the mother of all wrong is the fact that we expect a certain turnout.  Success, we call it.  But like in bad science, one must develop a hypothesis, and probably a somewhat educated or informed one (as supposed to I’m going to try and set everything on fire to see what doesn’t catch).  The bad part comes in when you assume your hypothesis will be proven true, and you’d do everything to sway the results.  You can re-experiment over and over again, and quite possibly make new, unexpected discoveries along the way.  You can develop alternate methods to try from a new perspective.  But not getting what you want at the end is not bad science.  It’s just science.  And accepting your hypothesis is untrue and moving on makes you a good scientist – time to do something else.

“A shitty scientist goes into an experiment determined to get a specific result.” “Don’t all scientists do that? Isn’t that what a hypothesis is?” I responded. “What? No. What the fuck? Jesus Christ. Fucking public schools. A hypothesis is when the scientist says, ‘This is what I think might happen.”

― Halpern, Justin “I Suck At Girls”

So sometimes you mix in a drop of the wrong ingredient, and it all blows up.  Other times, you dump in a boatload, and get no reaction at all.  Either way, you don’t really know what would happen.  You can only take your best guess.  And even when you think you’ve gotten the same results over and over again, you can’t necessarily prove that your hypothesis is right or wrong.  Because life is more than a science.  Science is a pretty good instrument that can provide some nifty explanation in helping you write your story.  But life is a whole lot more.  All the situations we get into come with whole different sets of variables.  And if you didn’t take these things into consideration, the end result will likely be this:  I’m what’s wrong, because I am the only common denominator in all these situations.

And what about all the right things you’ve done along the way?  Surely you’ve touched someone’s life at one point or another – made someone laugh or laughed with someone, returned a smile or a simple nod, defended someone or yourself….  What if the outcome truly was less important?  Surely one can’t become a scientist if she didn’t (learn to) enjoy the process of experimentation.  In that case, what I bought during the trip is much less important than the experience.  Be it the good parts or the bad parts.  That’s just life.  And if you could learn to embrace all of it, while it’s happening, my bet (hypothesis) is: that’s a pretty good life.