02/04/2025
A beautiful and timely piece by Liz Gilbert.
Worth sharing ❤️
Dear Love, what would you have me know about my mistakes?
Love answers:
Dear star seed, please don’t break our heart. Please don’t break your own heart, with this question. Please don’t come here looking for discipline, correction, a way to be better.
Life is not a self-improvement program, you know.
YOU are not a self-improvement program.
If you make this thing — this journey, this adventure, this experience of life — into a self-improvement program, you will only end up hurt, disappointed, lost, and ashamed. Because you cannot play that way and win. (And “to win” in this scenario means to know serenity. What else could it mean? Because anything else that you win or gain in life that doesn’t come with serenity isn’t worth much at all, is it? Haven’t you learned this?)
Anyway, hear us out.
We aren’t good at mathematics over here at the Department of Unconditional Love, but we do know this: you, and everyone on Earth, have been given billions of options across the course of your life — literally, BILLIONS of options — for what moves to take in this game. Even in the simplest life (and please don’t be fooled: nobody’s life is simple, despite what it might look like) every single day there are thousands and thousands of options for what choices you can make, what direction you can go in. And each choice branches out into thousands more choices, and then intersects with the thousands of choices that other people have made, and pretty soon you’re living in a world of exponentially limitless possibility.
As it has been designed to be.
Because the universe likes it that way. It likes choices. If there is one thing we can tell you about God, or whatever you want to call the Great Mysterious Infinite, it is this: the Great Mysterious Infinite Thing loves freedom. It loves its own freedom, and it loves yours. Which is why you’ve been given so much of it.
So let us ask you something, pixie breath. What do you think happens over the course of a lifetime when people have limitless choices and limitless freedoms to chart their own way, in limitless directions?
All kinds of stuff will happen. Wonderful experiences will happen, and growth, and learning, and transformations, and curiosity, and adventure — and also what you call mistakes. Some of those mistakes will feel horrific, terrible, unforgivable. Mistakes that come with consequence, regrets, loss, shame.
Did you think there was a way to avoid this?
Our little good student, our anxious perfectionist, did you think that if you tried hard enough you could move through this field of infinite choices without ever making a misstep (or a few hundred of them) and without ever doing anyone harm, or getting harmed?
Bunny poodle, no.
And once you’d made a mistake, did you think it would be fatal? What did you think should happen to you if you made a choice that created a problem — that you should be thrown away, eliminated from the proceedings, banished? Scorned? That you should hate yourself?
There is nobody — hear us, child — there is NOBODY who makes it through the gauntlet of Earth School without accumulating regrets. It cannot be done, honey. You can’t walk through this forest without stumbling, without getting lost, without falling into ravines. You can’t play this game without losing and you can’t attend this school without failing. You aren’t DESIGNED to play without losing and failing. That is true.
But what is also true is that you cannot do any of this wrong. Not in the long run. Because in the end, every single path leads back here to love. Everything gets absorbed back into love — and those who have failed the hardest are the first in line to be loved. Trust us on this. We’ve seen it. We ARE it.
Love is the prize. Love is the truth. Love is the outcome. Love is the end.
Honey, keep bringing us the broken shards of your shame and let us bandage you up again and again, and send you back out into the field of infinite possibilities to try again, to fail again, to forgive again.
You came here for the human experience — and you are having the human experience. So keep going. Don’t try to get it right; just keep showing up for the adventure, and trusting that you are loved through it all.
Whatever else you may lose — and you will lose a lot, because that’s how it goes — you can’t lose us. We are the best part of the design. We are the thing that makes it all worth it. We are the thing that catches you. We will meet you at the bottom, again and again, every time you fall. Just like we always have. Just like we always do.
Let us love you through it. That is the only thing we ask. That’s the only way this thing works. Let us love you. And let’s keep going.
