WRONG-DECISION PATHS

It doesn't seem like there are a lot of wrong-decision makers out there these days. People in the public eye aren't really allowed to admit that they chose the wrong path, and so by extension, neither are we. In fact, in a few cases high-profile people are actually forced to go down the poorly chosen highway with blinkers on, trying to bend space, time, and reality just to prove that they really got it right all along. It's the only logical conclusion of the post-truth universe: I am always right, no matter what.

Where I come from, we call that pride. It's toxic stuff. It seeps in and grabs you from the inside out; it hides the stars and blocks the sun as though they revolve around you, persuading you that you're always the hero of your story.

I'm like this. I struggle with the path of wrong decision. As a teenager I took some wrong turns (I made a lot of right ones too). In my twenties, I let myself get distracted, and aged thirty I took a couple of paths that led me miles out of the way. It happens.

I feel recently as though I've taken one or two decisions that haven't been wise either. They're only small, inconsequential things. But I've already noticed how hard it is to backtrack them. And the rippling impact is always felt somewhere.

The conclusion is that making mistakes is human. It's part of our nature. Some are massive and irreversible; others can be patched up. All can be learned from, but it takes great strength to do so - and part of that is admitting it.

Ultimately if there's no such thing as absolute truth, we can't do this can we? There'd be no wrong path, no poor decision, no badly chosen way. That's why I think the post-truth universe is such a dangerous idea - it would be a tyranny: a prison in which we all believed we were free, and none of us actually were. It would be a maze of billions of pathways walked by billions of lonely, frustrated human beings, incapable of learning, growing or being mistaken. Every connected path would collide two versions of the truth, and there would never be any way to reconcile them without a standard - like a car crash in which nobody is at fault but everybody is still somehow furious.

I don't want to live in that world. I want to push back against it. I have made, and will make, my way down unwise paths. Some will be deliberate; some will not. I want to be sure that someone will show me. I want to be even surer that I'll realise, and then do something about it.