Living with Your Mistakes

When I started my house, I was a rank beginner in construction. Truth be told, I had never built anything more involved than bookshelves at that point in my life. I had the great gift of an acre of land to work with, and it was a hilly acre. I read as much as I could about what I was about to undertake, and then I simply dove in. One of the first things I did, after cutting trees and pulling brush away, was to lay out the foundation of the house. This was an ark-shaped perimeter, on a hillside, with irregular bedrock just a foot or two below the surface. I worked out how to use a water level, which is made from a length of garden hose, duct tape, and a couple of two-liter soda bottles with the bottoms cut off of them, filled with water. It sounds like something that should need two people to work properly, and it is, but I did what I could with it. Alone in the woods, I laid out my best approximation of a symmetrical three-cornered foundation with two curved walls and a rise of about eleven feet from end to end.

Pouring the footing...

Later, after I had done my best with the footing, with a lot of help from friends and family, then done my best with the double-width, curved, uphill, cement block foundation, I learned that my curves, as laid out, were not exactly symmetrical. Actually I had several inches of irregularity, and I told myself that if I just built the floor, then built the cordwood walls as best I could, I would figure out what to do with the roof when I got to that point. Nobody would know the difference. 

I expect that an engineer would have done a better job of cleaning up after such a start, but I'm not an engineer. Three years later, when I was closing in on roofing over the curved end of the house, I spent many an hour sitting up there on top of the cordwood, cussin' and figurin', trying my best to make the roof look good on top of the structure that I had made. Ultimately, I would have to say that it turned out okay, but not anywhere near perfect. My placement of the piers for the floor structure brought me similar difficulties. My cabinets in the bathroom and kitchen are enough off-square that I can't possibly buy off-the-rack parts, and must fabricate every last little piece to fit.

Today I find myself reviewing past mistakes, of course wishing I hadn't made them, for sure wanting to find a good outcome anyway. The echoes of those mistakes resonate through so much of what followed, and I have to find my way through my present, all the while adjusting to the course set by what I did back in the day. 

Roofing was so complicated because of mistakes in the foundation!

By now I'm sure you have realized that I'm prone to metaphor and allegory. How does all of this apply to life in general? Well, for one, I have to accept that I laid out my house, and also my life, in a way that would cause me trouble later, and I have to deal with it as best I can. For another, if I can look at that wavy roof, and realize that it works okay, that it reflects the best that I knew how to do at the time, and believe that I truly tried to make it good in spite of a bad start, I should be able to look at other aspects of my life the same way. Sure, I should have done things differently, and I would go back and change things if I could. I can't, though, and can only do better going forward, while doing my damnedest to make better anything that I messed up on my way here.

A difference between the house and the rest of my life is that I had the best intentions when I laid out my foundation. With the rest of my life, I have to admit that selfishness and lack of consideration were a big part of where I went wrong. What can I do about this? Time will tell, but the same answer is there. I can't change the past, but I can damned well avoid making the same mistakes. I can adjust my course, and simply do everything I can to make the rest of my work, of my life, much better, not just for myself, but for those I love.

One lesson I can take from the way my foundation echoes into my roof and everything else in my house is that when you can't undo things, you can at least do everything you can to make the eventual outcome better. The first step (of many) is to realize where you went wrong, and why.