Have you switched off your screens, and are you ready to ponder the above prompt? Wait – didn’t we already ponder something very similar at the very beginning of this column, “Let’s Talk!”? Something about a moment that defines awkwardness?
Let’s recapitulate that I defined it as the moment when we get caught at something that makes us look inadvertently gauche and embarrassed. There is no way that we can live through such a moment, and yet we do. In such a moment, before we realize that we WILL survive it, no matter what everybody else thinks about us, we might wish for the earth to swallow it up. To be honest, it has never occurred to me that this would be a solution to making a mistake undone. The mistake would still be around, minus the person who’d committed it. So, the thing with a culprit-swallowing earth is selfish and not to the purpose.
Rather, I wish that I could turn back the clock and do something differently at the decisive moment, this time. To make it better. Or to avoid a specific situation entirely. I don’t want to hurt people or to make a spectacle of myself– so could I, please, rewind my tape of life to shortly before I did, and choose another option?
Also, it just occurred to me what if this wish to be swallowed up were something realistic? That we’d actually be swallowed as soon as we wished for it. Imagine the number of people who would suddenly vanish from sight. And who would be left? Only those who wouldn’t be embarrass-able, so the perfect and the nefarious. To be honest, in that case, I’d rather avoid the conflict between them, even as an audience, and be swallowed up.
But that’s just some pondering on taking something too literally. Back to reality, therefore.
We all have experienced moments that have been embarrassing, some maybe bitterly so. That bitter that even an apology wouldn’t change a thing anymore. Still, an apology is what will save us when it is about a situation we brought upon somebody else. They may still not look at us with the same eyes ever again, but at least we owned it up. As to a situation we brought upon ourselves without damage to anybody else, just to our own pride and self-image … we’ll live it down without Earth opening as much as a crack. A joke about ourselves is the best remedy. And then, everybody else who also makes one is just a me-too comedian; they will become boring all too soon.
As to turning back the clock – where would our learning curve go if we could? And wouldn’t we, with our wisdom at the same level as before, make the same mistake again? Not as in the movie “Groundhog Day” where tonight’s insight will change the outcome of every repeated day. But standing at field one, every time, with the same level of experience, therefore the same handling of the same challenge.
In the end, neither will happen – not the undoing of the situation nor the disappearance of ourselves. We have to man up, own up, and continue. As it is, Earth has a lot on her hands due to people’s mindlessness, already. She doesn’t need even more “food”.
