TRANSCRIPT
Be willing to get your feet muddy. When I was a kid, I was always out playing, playing with my friends, playing all afternoon, in the summertime, morning to night, out playing by streams and by ponds and in swamps. And I didn’t want to get my feet muddy. I didn’t want to get my nice or not so nice sneakers muddy. I didn’t want mud in my shoes, ’cause I didn’t want mud and sticks and dirt all inside of my shoes. I wanted to have nice, clean, dry shoes, but I also wanted to explore my world. I wanted to explore the streams and swamps. I wanted to explore the edges of the ponds and try to catch the turtles that were there. And I was always running down, trying to grab them and jumping across streams that were, you know, just about as far as I thought I could jump across. And well, sometimes I made mistakes.
And I started learning as a child that if I was out for more than 3 or 4 hours, it was pretty likely that I was going to come home with at least one muddy shoe. And at a certain point, probably about age 10 or 11, I just started accepting this is my lot in life. I’m gonna come home with at least one muddy shoe and probably two. And when I accepted that reality, it was sort of like I could allow myself to love myself in spite of making the inevitable mistake that I made, jumping across a creek that was a little too far for me and hitting my foot and sliding in. And I’d maybe jump across 50 times, but one out of 50 times I’d screw up and slide into the water, get my butt all wet, too, or stand on a stone that would tilt and I’d fall in, or step on a log that had more algae than I realized, and I’d slip and fall. And it happened all the time.
And I look at that now in two different ways. Now age 53. One thing I learn about that is the practical value of having made so many mistakes and gotten myself muddy a thousand times or 5,000 times as a kid. The other side of it is the metaphorical meaning of this whole discussion because I’m not really talking about getting my feet muddy with mud here. But first, the practical.
Now, as an adult, I’m out in the world. I live in nature a lot. I go camping in nature a lot. I go hiking in nature a lot. I go climbing, rock climbing and mountain climbing and jumping across creeks still and fording across rivers still. I do wild stuff all the time in all sorts of new environments, new countries, places I’ve never been. And what I have come to realize is that all those thousands or tens of thousands of hours I spent as a child directly interfacing with nature and making all those mistakes and 49 out of 50 times not making a mistake. I learned about my body. I learned how to stretch and jump and run and climb. I also learned how to interface with the world. I learned how stones move. I learned how mud moved. I learned about how water moved. I learned about logs and algae. I learned how to test myself. I learned how to learn and know what my abilities were.
And part of why I speak about this now is sometimes I engage in these nature activities, these hikes and climbs and jumps and camping and things like this, fording rivers with other people, groups of other people. Sometimes, usually I do it alone, but sometimes with one or two other people, but sometimes with people who didn’t do this as a child, didn’t explore and experiment and screw up thousands of times. And what I find is even though sometimes these people are in better shape than me, younger than me, stronger than me, perhaps even inherently faster than me, they are a risk to themselves because they don’t know their bodies as intricately as I do. They don’t also know the world as well as I do. They don’t know how it works as well. And I can sometimes often do things that they can’t do because all of my past experimentation translated into present day experience and I learned from my mistakes. And for those who didn’t get the opportunity to make enough mistakes, they didn’t learn as much and they didn’t grow as much.
Before I get to the metaphor of all this, now I just want to give one little shout out to parents who let their children go out and get muddy and make mistakes and screw up. I see a lot of parents out in the world who protect their kids from this. Always supervise their kids. Don’t let their children get muddy. Don’t let their children go near streams. Oh, there’s dirt in there. There’s mud. You could fall. You could get hurt. Wait, the stream is 6 inches deep and there’s mud on the bottom. How could your child possibly get hurt? The worst that can happen is they can fall in and get muddy and then try again and eventually learn how to walk across mud, how to jump across mud. But so many people protect their children out of fear. Fear that something bad will happen that their children become stunted as the result. And as they grow up, they don’t know how to interface with the world.
And because of this, someday when they get into a position where other people may know more about the world, these children who didn’t get to experiment as much, didn’t get to screw up as much, they don’t realize how limited they are. And often when they make a mistake, it’s a much bigger mistake. Sometimes these are the people who fall down the mountainside because they really did not know how to estimate their climbing ability, for instance. So that’s my shout out. Parents, let your kids get out there and get muddy and try stuff.
And now the metaphor, the getting your feet muddy, interpersonally screwing up, making I think about myself making very, very many dumb interpersonal mistakes, troubled relationships, troubled friendships, not being a good friend sometimes, not being a good boyfriend sometimes, having drunken hookups sometimes where I felt terrible shame and guilt afterwards. Being abandoning, being emotionally unavailable to people, being stupid sometimes, experimenting in stupid ways when I was young with drugs and alcohol, learning the hard way sometimes. How many things like this? Getting fired from jobs a few times, getting rejected in different ways because of dumb behavior on my part, all sorts of mistakes that were part of an experimentation process.
Now, I will say this largely in my young years, because I know I’m painting myself to sound like some sort of awful person, I still think actually my original idea of 49 out of 50 times I did it right and one out of 50 I screwed up. I think it’s also true interpersonally or my experimentation with drugs and sex and things like that. 49 out of 50 times I did well. And one out of 50 times I really messed up. And I think I learned the most from that one out of 50 times.
And so when I sum all this up about the mud on our feet, about cleaning my dirty shoes thousands of times, rinsing them off with a hose, drying them next to a heater, drying them in the sun, and going out the next day and trying again. Trying not to make mistakes, but making the inevitable mistakes and acknowledging and admitting the mistakes and learning from the mistakes and then trying again and again. I think that’s a big part of why I’m here at all and why I have something to share because I did gain experience about life, about myself, about the traumas of my childhood, about the horrible mistakes of my parents that mostly they didn’t learn from and why I had to break away from them in order to keep learning and why I kept going back to them again and again and again to get them to love me and eventually realizing that that was a mistake.
I was trying to wake up people who not only didn’t want to wake up but couldn’t wake up. They were stuck in their comfort, their denial, and their lies. And that wasn’t my fate. That wasn’t the truth of who I was, the truth that I needed to follow. And so again and again I kept reorienting myself toward truth, toward inner truth, toward outer truth, toward learning. And now here I am age 53 with some real life experience that…
I am trying to share with others in order not just to be useful, but to make value from my life to help others in part, not make some of the mistakes that I did. And also to help people have compassion for their own selves when they make mistakes, so they can turn that compassion inward and grow.