Mistake Salad
by Alan Cohen
A mother seeking to inspire her
young son to progress with his piano lessons took him to a concert by
the famed virtuoso Ignacy Paderewski. After the two took their seats,
mom noticed a friend a few aisles away, and went to chat with her.
When mother returned,
she discovered her son was missing from his seat. She began to
search for him, but he was nowhere to be found. Suddenly the house
lights dimmed, the curtains parted, and a spotlight shined on the
gleaming Steinway piano on stage. There, to the woman’s horror,
she saw her little boy sitting at the keyboard, innocently picking out
the notes to “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” Embarrassed beyond words, she
began to rush to the stage to retrieve her mischievous little musician.
Before she could get there, however, the great piano master emerged from
a stage wing and approached the child. Paderewski leaned over and
whispered in the boy’s ear, “keep playing.” Then he reached his arms
around the boy’s and added a bass part with his left hand. With his
right hand Paderewski improvised a running obbligato. Together, the
seasoned master and the young novice turned a potential disaster into a
triumph that inspired everyone. Are you so sure your mistakes
are just mistakes? Or could they be building blocks to a success beyond
any you imagined? When my friend Dorothy goes home
to visit her family each Thanksgiving, her mother serves the traditional
“mistake salad.” The dish was born many years ago, Dorothy explains,
when mother was using a cookbook to make a salad. In the process, mother
accidentally included half the salad ingredients from a recipe on the
left side of the open cookbook, and half the ingredients from a
different salad recipe on the opposite page. Everyone enjoyed the salad
so much that she continued to serve it every year. So it was really no
mistake at all. Then there was the fellow named
Alfred, who invented dynamite. When Alfred’s brother died, the city
newspaper confused the two and printed an obituary noting that the
deceased’s most notable act was the creation of the explosive,
subsequently adapted to manufacture bombs. Stunned to consider that his
name would forever be associated with destruction, Alfred sought to
leave a more positive legacy to humanity. So he instituted a prize for
people who contributed to world peace. Now the Nobel Prize, established
by Alfred Nobel, is the most coveted and respected award in the world.
Everything is part of something
bigger, and mistakes are no exception. Every minus is half of a plus,
waiting for a stroke of vertical awareness. In his brilliant book
Illusions, Richard Bach explains that every problem comes to you with a
gift in its hands. If you focus only on what went wrong, you miss the
gift. If you are willing to look deeper and ask for the insight, the
problem dissipates, you are left only with the learning, and you advance
on your path. Gallup conducted a poll asking
people what was the worst thing that ever happened to them. Then the
pollsters asked the same people what was the best thing that ever
happened to them. The surveyors found an 80% correlation between the
worst and best experiences. Four out of five people reported that the
worst thing that ever happened to them turned out to be the best.
A Course in Miracles tells us,
“It takes great learning to understand that all things, events,
encounters and circumstances are helpful.” The Course also notes that
trust is the bedrock of a true master’s belief system. Trust implies
faith that there is a wiser plan afoot than the one that meets the eye.
Only the inner eye, the insight of higher wisdom, can make sense out of
apparent human error. We all make mistakes, and plenty
of them. Enlightenment does not ask you to be perfect; it simply asks
you to be open to a bigger picture that embraces your humanity while
rising above it. True perfection has space for imperfection. Think of
your life as a grand mosaic. When you examine your acts with a
magnifying glass, you see many flaws. Step back, and you discover that
every little piece has an important place in a grander design. It is our
belief in mistakes, and dwelling upon them, that makes them seem more
real than eternal love. Within you is a child who
wriggles off into unacceptable places. Also within you is a Paderewski,
a master who knows how to transform child’s play into a masterpiece. You
can regret your errors, and those of others, or you can honor them. At
the very least, mistakes are opportunities to practice forgiveness. At
the most, they are invitations to acknowledge perfection. Ultimately,
real forgiveness means seeing good where others find fault. A friend is
someone who sees through you and still enjoys the view. You become your
own best friend when you do the same. Salad, anyone?