Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Open mouth and insert ... well, you know.

My fellow astronauts... - Dan Quayle, former Vice President of the United States, beginning a speech at an Apollo 11 anniversary.

Sometimes I find myself in some exciting or unnerving situation where my brain has utterly failed me. My mind races at a hundred miles an hour, running through word after word, phrase after phrase, and for some reason, the appropriate thing to say won't come out of my mouth.

It's hard to stay in the moment when you are thinking about so many different things, from outcomes of actions to what you had for breakfast that morning. But I find that grounding myself, slowing down, and being present - especially during these situations - can prevent something like the above quote from happening. A big breath in, a good and full exhale, and I'm back in business.

At the same time, it's quite the reminder of how human I am when I manage to mess up what I meant to say, or when I should've just kept my mouth shut. And when the most visible or admired people in the world do exactly the things that I dread doing myself, it's comforting to know that we all are capable of these mistakes, big or small. It also makes it easier to laugh at myself from time to time.

3 comments:

Prashanth Lakshminarasimhan said...

Yeah , u r absolutely right, what i feel is if we do not commit mistakes we become enlightened , its human tendency to commit mistakes...

cheers keep blogging

Escapologist said...

We wouldn't be human if we didn't make mistakes ...

Anonymous said...

I laugh as much as possible when I am in an uncomfortable position, it makes all the awkwardness disappear lol