Quote of the Week...from James Joyce

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.        ---James Joyce
 
James Joyce was an Irish author of the previous century, considered by some to be the greatest writer of English literature since Shakespeare.  Not having read his works, I couldn't say whether I agree or not...besides, I'm not that big a fan of Shakespeare, anyway.  I do know that Joyce was well known for writing fiction with language very difficult to understand for its complexity...and his book Finnegans Wake is a unintelligible morass of cryptic, disconnected phrases with numerous sojourns into other languages.  So I was tempted to use the following quote of Joyce instead on this St. Patrick's Day: I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.  But hey, I already knew of this successful strategy of writing with popular songwriters like Beck or R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe...

As for the above quote that I did use, I think that few things could be more true.  We do learn from our mistakes...the trick is to keep them from being fatal, debilitating, or harmful to others.  One of the problems I had with the way things were structured during my school years was how mistakes were consistently used to judge whether a student was "good" or "bad".  The fewer mistakes you made meant that you got a higher grade and more meant you were headed for trouble.  Now supposedly homework and in-class assignments were supposed to bring out mistakes so that students could learn from them and they could then do well on quizzes and tests...but if these learning assignments were also graded and recorded by how many mistakes they contained, then the student was discouraged from this important learning experience and would be more defensive about how he or she performed them...

In a broader sense, in our lives we're all making mistakes left and right.  It's better to already know that doing or saying a particular thing is going to backfire and never try it.  And sometimes behavior that is counterproductive or even harmful will go unchecked until the habit is well entrenched and the consequences happen later on down the line.   Better that a mistake is exposed as early as possible and corrected.  But in a more creative sense...and here is where James Joyce might have been going with this quote...mistakes can often lead one to reconsider where they are going and to either change their direction, reevaluate what they are doing and why, or to discover a better solution to their situation...one that opens up new opportunities heretofore hidden from them...