If you lead a very individual life, you are creative, you are an experimenter; others may see you as a bit strange. And it’s a given that you would make more mistakes than someone who spends their whole life watching tele and having cups of tea.

Mind you I don’t begrudge those who love to sit around sipping tea and not doing much. Not a bad life — unless your brain turns to mush from too much contemplation and not enough pizzaz.

Mistakes are often born in the soup of creativity and it is our flushes of creativity that help us understand and resolve our difficulties. Without this resolution the world can overwhelm us with its chaos or lead us into a stupor. Our creative endeavours set us free from the mundane, if only we would let them.

Mistakes are there for the taking and can be alarming or even calamitous. No doubt we all have created some true blue humdingers in our life — relationships, money, religious/spiritual attachments. And if you are an experimenter, then you may not have guidance from so called learned people who know best about doing things the “normal” or “correct” way. This can be a problem but it’s comes with the territory of going out on a limb.

It also comes to mind that we need to make mistakes. Lots of little mistakes that propel us into new and more exciting endeavours are celebratory. It’s how we learn and evolve. By watching tele all your life you can avoid lots of little mistakes but end up with one ginormous mistake — the fact that you did nothing.

Of course some mistakes are detrimental to your wellbeing and need to be fixed pronto. Often they are the ones we tend to repeat again and yet again. We all know those — awful they are.

Interpersonal relationships are where we can really botch things up. So you shacked up with your partner and after some time, months, years, decades, they turned out to be exceptionally odious and you ended up going through a disaster. You came out the other side, the energy opened up and with the experience under your belt you find a new partner who is different and life becomes much more salubrious. One can extend this tradition — first partner was practice, second partner better. Third, well positively charming. Fourth, you’re in the promised land.

Money is another one. As a young lad I didn’t have a clue about anything financial so I had to make many mistakes to learn the ropes and build confidence around business and feeling worthy enough to receive money. It was tough going but now I’ve got a much better grasp of it all (I am trying to get my head around crypto at the moment and that is a challenge).

As we age we become more and more risk averse. Ok fair enough, it’s natural. Change is complex and multifaceted and can be scary at times. But we shouldn’t let that quash our creative juices. Keeping our creativity flowing should be right up there with having breakfast. We may take a breather from time to time to deal with humdrum matters but it’s vital to come back to experimentation and embrace beautiful mistakes.