Excuses and Mistakes

 Excuses and Mistakes

I recently wrapped up reading my memoir book club book, The Other Wes Moore, this week. I think what’s so interesting about the book is that a lot of the information in the book isn’t directly in the story. The author always includes an exodus from the story before each section to bring the readers back to reality, and there was a long epilogue, and a section beforehand setting up the context.

One thing this past week that really struck me when reading was when the author explicitly used the word “disgust” in an encounter with the other Wes. The other Wes was describing almost a justification for the reason he turned out this way. He said something along the lines of “I think we turn out how people expect us to turn out” as a way of blaming the people around him for his eventual bad ending. 

In a lot of ways I really understand why the author felt a little bit of resentment towards the other Wes for saying that. When things go wrong it’s always easy to point fingers at other people and say they were the reason we turned out like this, or that the situation turned out like this. In most cases, and in this case in particular, that is usually at least partly true. But, more often than not, it’s hard to recognize our shortcomings and what we need to improve on as well.

Because of this, if we all got the chance to relive our lives without all the “could’ve” or “should’ve”s we have now, it really wouldn’t help that much. Life always throws more at us, we always make more mistakes, and so the most important thing to remember is to not make excuses, not not to make mistakes.