I'm gonna make a mistake . . .

Dear Anonymous,

There are certain things that, if you are an informed homo sapien, are common sense about experience. If you stay up too late too many nights in a row, no amount of coffee will keep you awake. Fall in love when you are young and you will have heartbreak. If there is a potential for pain, pain will manifest itself. Our bodies will fail us when we least expect it, our lives will collapse when they seem most in place. Just because you are thinking about someone does not mean they are thinking of you, too. Friendships will fade away, with no fanfare. Sleep with someone who is “just a friend” and it will not work out.

You do not need to live all of these things to know they are true. They are depicted faithfully and extensively in literature, film, television, and music. The arts, perhaps, exist to tell the common human stories, and many are of pain. Even the good feelings have pain. Fall in love and you will be vulnerable. Move to a beautiful new city and you will feel alone. Leave an abusive boyfriend and you will still miss him.

Should we then avoid what thousands of years of culture tell us will cause pain? Should we live on farms and eat simply so as to avoid even the pain of indigestion? Or should we try to ignore all those lessons, live and not learn, fall in love with that married woman, move to that foreign city, fuck our best friend, fall hard into teenage love, run away from our no-good husbands, wave gently goodbye to our college friends, stay up late, submit poems and demo tapes that will be rejected? Should we just go ahead and make mistakes?

Yes. Because when people stop making mistakes, willfully, culture will stop. It's the same stories over and over only because we keep thinking of new ways to tell them. New references for new times, new metaphors that are sharper and truer than others. Same lessons, new methods. Throw what you feel into the big pot of experience. Here is the number one reason why you should willfully, gleefully, make a mistake from time to time:

If you avoid things simply because they haven't worked out for others, then you avoid life itself.