What would happen if everybody was perfect and no mistakes were made? Would we have experiences to look back on and lessons to learn from? Probably not, even though we as people hate to mess up, there is always something good that will come from it. I believe that people learn from their mistakes.

You see it in movies and read it in books, people do it all the time. People will just automatically lean against a wall or door to talk to someone. But did anything ever happen to them? Of course not, I do it once and I end up on the concrete. I stopped to talk to my mom in the kitchen. I was about to go to the car so I was beside the door, it just so happened to be a convenient place to lean. It was just my luck that the door wasn’t completely latched and I ended up falling through. Luckily for me the concrete caught my fall. Well that and my arm. The lesson for this mistake you ask? Well to make it short, don’t lean up against anything that isn’t sturdy.

Not only do doors have it out for me, the stairs do too. “Now remember,” my mom said, “you can’t skip down these stairs like you used to in our old house.” “Yes, mom I know.” But do you really think a five year old would pay any attention? We had just moved into a brand new house and I was drawing in the toy room in the basement. I came upstairs to show my mom what I had drawn. She was unpacking the kitchen so she told me to hang it up on the fridge and go back downstairs to make her another one. I ran out of the kitchen so fast I bumped into a box of pans. After I had caught my balance, I started walking down the stairs. When all of a sudden I got the idea that it would be smart to skip the rest of the way, sadly it wasn’t. Since there was no banister to hold, I ended up falling forward, rolling down the stairs, and into an antique gumball machine. In the end I walked away with a broken arm and a couple of scratches. And to think I could have avoided it all if I just would have listened to my mom.

However the one time I did listen to my mom, I ended up in the emergency room. Of course, I was two and took what she said way too far. Somehow I managed to take a chair from the dining room to the kitchen. Once that was accomplished I climbed above the microwave and got into the locked cabinet. There I found the medicine that my mom would say was important for me to take everyday. The medicine came in a bottle and was half empty. I took all that was left, but the problem was that this medicine was used to slow down your heart rate. Once I took it I went up to my mom and told her that I was a “good girl” because I took “all my medicine.” My mom looks down and says, “How much did you take?” Somehow she still managed to keep that plastered smile on her face through the whole incident. My answer quickly changed to “Nothing.” Ten minutes later I ended up in the emergency room as the “toddler code-red” getting my stomach pumped. This time I learned that medicine can also put you in the emergency room.
“Consider every mistake you make as an asset.” I believe the past does not have to determine the future. That, of course, is your choice and no one else can decide whether you will “fall” for the same error twice.