Impulsiveness and cluelessness leads to injury. It’s one of the lessons that life painfully teaches us. Everyone has those impulsive moments; maybe you broke your arm jumping off the roof of your house, or perhaps you decided to attempt to transport a ‘possum who you believed was dead. Regardless, everyone learns this lesson at some point in their life.

For me, my life’s been comprised of a number of irrational blunders. At the age of three, I dreamt of flying an airplane one day. Thanks to my aerodynamically-inclined toddler mind, I desperately wanted to fly by any means possible. This meant that I had to pretend that I was Superman. In order to achieve my goal, I had to stand on the back of the bath tub, close my eyes, and jump. My chin had its own agenda and elected to collide with the faucet. Seven stitches later, I learned that doing such a thing hurts quite a bit.

Another time, I opted to use a more unorthodox method of crossing the street. Frogger was a fun game to play as a child, so I decided to play it in a real-life setting. After being scared half to death, I decided that for the safety of my life, I should refrain from jumping highways.

The most recent example was a trip I made recently. My father, his girlfriend, her daughter, her granddaughter and I went to the wonderful town of Battlecreek, Michigan. We visited my father’s side of the family. On the Saturday afternoon that we were up there, I wanted to go on a walk. Two and a half hours, round trip. Two things went wrong on that walk. First, instead of walking through the town, I elected to traverse the countryside. Second, I thought it would be a good idea to take a shortcut through a field. Of course, being the veritable genius I am, I walked through a field of thistles. I walked into the worst of them. I walked no more. I got to meet the ground that day.

There is a point in all of this, though. The impulses and urges to do things that are not the greatest ideas are a sign of a much larger reality; we all learn from mistakes. Whether the mistakes are large or small, they teach us.

I have decided to form my life around a simple, paradigmatic point; accidents can, and will, happen. No matter where I go, what I do, what I say, or who I am with, something will mess up. I’m then faced with two choices; either refuse to learn from the mistake, sulk, pout, and exasperate myself over the smallest things, or learn from all of the mistakes I make,` and when I fall, to get back up again.

There’s an old Chinese proverb. “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” Thousands of years later, they turn out to be right.