Wrong

I recently heard an interesting presentation by the journalist and author Kathryn Schulz. In short, the talk was about being wrong. The part of the talk that most stood out to me was an analogy using Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote. It seemed that in every episode there was that scene when the roadrunner ran off a cliff and the poor coyote followed. The roadrunner simply started flying, but the coyote kept running. And it took a few moments for him to realize he had just run off a cliff. In other words, there was a brief second when he was thought he was still running and in fact he was about to fall.

The lesson, Schulz tells us, is that being wrong doesn’t necessarily feel like that anything. Or more specifically, it feels exactly like being right.

And that got me thinking. There are so many parts of my life that could potentially turn into Wile E. Coyote moments of disaster that it’s simply terrifying. The trauma bay, the operating room, personal relationships, my faith…Am I about to fall off a cliff without even realizing it? Who is going to get hurt most in that process?

We’ve all heard that beautiful sentiment of the wings of faith: that when we come to the edge of all that we know, we must believe that we will either be given hard rock to stand on or wings to fly. Lovely – but it never seemed to happen to the coyote. How does that fit in?

Schulz argues that being wrong is fundamental to being human – it’s what makes us who we, as a species, are. She mentions that Saint Augustine – nearly a thousand years before Descartes wrote “I think therefore I am” – proclaimed “I err, therefore I am.”

I guess it’s comforting to realize that we live in a world full of mistakes, many of them our own. I don’t think it means that we have to accept them, but it does mean that, one way or another, we will encounter them. Lots of them.

I just went for a walk. It’s a lovely evening, so I figured I might as well enjoy it. I walked up long flight of steps leading to art museum and turned to gaze at the city skyline. I stared at those buildings and those lights, and as I did a warm breeze touched my face. How many mistakes, I wondered, had I made up until now and never realized it? What can I do to start realizing it before it’s too late?