Being Wrong
A spiritual experience
Sometimes being wrong is fun. You can be pleasantly wrong. Like when you’ve made assumptions about someone only to discover that they’re not like that at all.
Before Google, we used to argue all night and both of us would be absolutely certain we were right. We would debate from our opposite viewpoints as the moon went down and the keg went dry and the red Solo cups littered the lawn.
It might not be until the next day when we’d find out the answer because someone would go to the library and look it up in a book, I guess. I don’t remember how we used to find things out. Encyclopedias? Anyway, there was a lot more left up to argument, and fewer ways to find out “the truth.”
I don’t remember how we used to find things out. Encyclopedias?
It was also harder to know how to pronounce things. You couldn’t just look it up. You had to read it in print and sound it out. Carl “Young” or Carl “Yoooooong.” You say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to. Until someone corrects you and says, “That’s not how you pronounce it.”
Of course, this still happens. Kamala (like a comma and a la). Saoirse (which I never knew how to say until I heard it’s like, “inertia”).
We have a joke in our house because my mom LOVES the chef Jamie Oliver, but she can’t stop calling him Jamie Gallagher. If you’re from the ‘80s like me, you’ll picture a mustachioed Jamie Oliver dressed in suspenders and a newspaper boy hat taking a sledgehammer to a watermelon.
More often though, being wrong totally sucks.
Song lyrics can be fun to get wrong. Like my friend Joy thought the song went, “Just call me angel of the morning, baby … just brush my teeth before you leave me, darlin’!”
In Toto’s song “Africa” I thought they were saying, “There’s nothing that a hundred men on Mars could ever do. . .”
More often though, being wrong totally sucks.
Especially when you’ve been so sure about something and argued confidently about it, and then you have to sheepishly admit you were wrong. Man, that is a tough one. My face and neck turn beet red and I start burning up with shame. My breath quickens and gets shallow. I feel the need to run away.
It’s just gut-wrenching to feel like a fool. The absolute worst times are when I realize that I’ve done something dangerous.
Like driving. Maybe I’m late or maybe I’m just in a bad mood, but I need to be going faster than traffic is going—and that’s when I get stuck behind the slowest driver in the universe. What’s wrong with them? I dart around only to find out that there was a very good reason … a pedestrian crossing the street or a construction zone.
Sometimes even when I know I’ve been wrong, I will double down on it. I’ll still try to defend my position—even once it’s been proven false. “Well! Who decided to fix that pothole right now! Don’t they know I have places to be!”
It’s the post-rage afterbirth that seems to keep coming even when the fight’s been lost.
We’ve all seen other drivers do this and we’ve smirked when they zoomed past us only to be stopped by a roadblock that forces them to a halt. Sometimes that person keeps fighting too. They curse and wave their middle fingers at us or nearly shear our side mirrors off speeding past at twice the speed limit.
It’s like a reflex to keep fighting. The part of us that wants so much to be righteous and victorious can’t stop running around the yard, even with our heads cut off.
I’ve found ways to lessen that backlash and see it for what it is—a desperate last swing of the sword in attempt to save my pride. It’s the post-rage afterbirth that seems to keep coming even when the fight’s been lost. It can be incredibly difficult to accept when something you believed to be a known fact turns out to be false.
It often takes seeing it with your own eyes to finally let go of the delusion. When it comes to finding out the truth about people you love, you might not believe it until you’ve been forced to look at the gruesome details.
Sometimes being wrong can be a revelation.
A lot of people think it’s better if we never learn the truth. Our parents and grandparents were much more likely to ignore bad behavior, to keep it locked up in secrets, to never discuss anything unsavory or painful. It was considered tacky and even life-threatening.
But that meant that a lot of people continued to have wrong ideas. It’s easier to believe that our heroes are always heroic than to accept that many who we admire are not who they pretend to be.
Sometimes being wrong can be a revelation.
I always think of Field of Dreams. Annie’s brother (played very convincingly by Timothy Busfield) keeps pushing them to sell the farm. He can only see it from the worldly perspective: Building this baseball field was an insane waste of money that is ruining them. He is so certain of his position that he is foreclosing, attempting to run his own sister and niece out of their home.
It's only when he witnesses a miraculous moment: Doc Graham emerges from the liminal world of the baseball field as an old man to save the daughter’s life.
“Don’t sell the farm, Ray,” the brother says—his face pale and ashen with surprise, shock, embarrassment … relief?
If you haven’t made any mistakes, you haven’t tried something hard enough.
If we’re lucky, we will experience being wrong and it all works out OK. We find out before we become the tools of our own destruction. But it doesn’t always work out that way.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the political divide. When I talk to people on the “other side,” I’m struck by just how firmly they believe. They’re being told that my side is being misinformed and led astray by propaganda of our own. We both think that we are 100% absolutely right, and that the other side is delusional and brainwashed.
In some ways, we’re probably both right. And in other ways, it is inevitable that one or both of us is horribly, tragically, terribly wrong.
And that means that one or both of us is going to have an awakening. We are going to have to face that we’ve been self-righteously blindly faithful to people and ideas that have very bad intentions. And we’ll have to accept that we’ve been hoodwinked. We didn’t know that we were being led astray. We thought that we were right. We felt it in our bones. But our bones were wrong.
Personally, I am wrong all the time. It is absolutely certain that I’m going to say something wrong, pronounce words wrong, get facts wrong, believe stupid things that show how gullible and naïve I am. I might misinterpret something or believe fake information. I am going to be wrong. I am going to make mistakes. Sometimes I’m going to be an idiot.
But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong about everything. It doesn’t mean that I’m a “wrong” person or that my value as a human being is any less. If anything, when someone is wrong or ignorant about something, the kind thing to do is to correct them without shaming them.
So often, our culture resorts to mockery. We are viciously cruel when someone makes a mistake. We rip that person to shreds. And if they’ve put themselves out there and been vulnerable, made a “fool of themselves,” then we take even more pleasure in tearing them down.
I think this is a wrong approach. Maybe if we had more compassion for people who are wrong, then we could find more ways to allow each other to fail. If we didn’t require perfection then we wouldn’t punish ourselves when we make mistakes, we’d see them for what they are: learning opportunities, moments of revelation.
When making mistakes and being wrong are treated like a natural part of life, then we could become a society of creative invention. Imagine the things we would all try and do and stretch and learn and grow into if we weren’t afraid of persecution.
And if someone messes up words, confuses phrases, forgets names, misremembers or just simply cannot get their brains to pronounce words correctly, well, we can gently correct them, laugh with them, lighten up about it. Loosen instead of tighten.
Invite the wrongness forward in your life instead of pushing it back. Make mistakes a natural part of the day. If you haven’t made any mistakes, you haven’t tried something hard enough. If you haven’t stumbled through pronouncing something, then you’re not stretching your brain enough.
Be wrong. It’s a beautiful thing. Just be sure to accept the awakening when it comes and allow the truth to wash over you, no matter how scary it may be. That, my friend, is the journey.
