My friend recently made a ridiculous and hilarious mistake. A wondrously stupid blunder. Sort of the equivalent of complaining that your television is broken without checking to see if it’s still plugged into the wall.
Only a lot worse.
Luckily, I was the one who discovered his mistake. As he described the problem that he was experiencing, I thought, “It can’t be this. Right? That’s just too stupid. He would’ve seen that solution a mile away. Right? Wait… could it?”
It was.
Upon realizing the mistake he had made, I burst into laughter.
My friend immediately asked – perhaps begged – me to never tell a soul about his mistake. If anyone ever discovered how foolish he had been, he explained, he’d never be able to live it down.
I agreed, of course, but I’ll never understand why.
About a year ago, on the way to the movies, Elysha and our friends stopped at CVS so I could run inside and buy some candy. As I jogged up the candy aisle, I tripped and fell, face-planting on the industrial carpeting in front of the Swedish fish.
A real ass-over-teakettle situation.
In fairness, the candy aisle had a slight, nearly imperceptible hill in the middle of it. An oddly unleveled surface in the middle of the store. The toe of my sneaker had caught the incline of this hill, sending me sprawling.
A woman at the end of the aisle saw the whole thing and immediately burst into laughter.
My chin, which had skidded across the carpet after I had hit the floor, was already burning. I wondered if it might be bleeding like a skinned knee.
My very first thought:
“I can’t wait to get back into the car and tell Elysha and Shera and David what just happened.”
My second thought:
“I’m so glad someone was here to see this happen.”
When I make a ridiculous mistake or a hilarious blunder, I can’t wait to tell everyone. I’ve felt this way for as long as I can remember. Even in middle school, I would do something inexplicably stupid and immediately find a way to tell everyone I knew.
Sometimes I find myself jealous of other people’s stupidity. I find myself wishing that I had done their stupid thing, too.
What I think I inherently understood at a young age and so clearly understand today are three things:
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Sharing my acts of stupidity will make other people laugh, and making people laugh is always a good thing, even if they are laughing at how dumb I am.
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Sharing my acts of stupidity always brings people closer to me, because every other human being is just as flawed as I am. Most people just don’t openly speak about their flaws. So when I tell people about my flaws and failures, they feel a little better about their own. Slightly less alone in this world.
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Sharing your acts of stupidity is a demonstration of confidence. Sometimes even courage. It’s a sign of great strength. Not weakness. A person who cannot laugh at himself or admit his own faults is a tragically fragile, deeply broken human being.
Donald Trump is an excellent example of this.
This is not to say that my friend is tragically fragile or broken in any way. He’s perfectly capable of laughing at himself and often does. In this particular case, his mistake exposed a professional weakness that he preferred to keep from becoming known.
I understand, but I still don’t get it. Being someone who publishes a list of his shortcomings and flaws every year (and requests that friends, family, and even strangers offer contributions to the list), I still don’t entirely understand my friend’s reluctance to share his weakness with the world, either.
It’s funny. Also understandable and relatable.
Five years ago, I asked my friend, Jeff, to repair a lamp from my daughter’s bedroom. It had stopped working, and she loved the lamp. The next day, Jeff handed the lamp back to me and said, “I changed the bulb, idiot.”
One year later, I handed Jeff that very same lamp, assuring him that this time it was actually broken. The next day, he handed the lamp back to me and said, “I changed the bulb again, idiot.”
My first thought:
I must tell everyone I know about this. Strangers, too. The whole world needs to know how stupid I am.
The last thing I would’ve done was beg Jeff to keep my stupidity a secret.
About three years ago, while driving home from dinner, Elysha and I started arguing over the color of our house. Even though we had been living in the house for almost a decade, we could not agree on its color. She claimed that it was somewhere between tan and gray, but I insisted that it was yellow. “As yellow as the sun,” I had declared with certainty. “I know the color of my own damn house.”
I did not. The house is not even close to being yellow.
I couldn’t wait to tell the world.
Do you think any less of me for sharing these blunders? These ridiculous acts of stupidity?
Probably not. If you do, I think it says more about you than it does about me.
My suggestion: Share your random acts of stupidity with the world. Celebrate your falls, failures, and foibles. Turn your moments of foolishness and idiocy into something that will bring laughter and joy to others.
Life gets a lot easier when you no longer need to spend your time and energy concealing your mistakes from the world. Even when that mistake is as ridiculous as not knowing the color of your own home.
