Mistakes

In his brilliant and timeless essay, “Solving for Pattern,” (first published 1981 in The Gift of the Good Land), the farmer poet philosopher Wendell Berry lays out about a dozen criteria of a “good solution,” one that operates organically within the pattern from which it arose.

Berry's desiderata for such a solution include wise counsel such as it being cheap, that it solves more than one problem at a time, that it is good in a variety of respects, including being beautiful, healthful, and fertile, but the one that I’ve always found most compelling is that “good solutions have wide margins, so that the failure of one solution does not imply the impossibility of another.”

In other words, good solutions allow us to screw up a bit and still not fail altogether.  They permit us to make mistakes from which we can recover fairly easily.  Everything doesn’t have to go perfectly for things to work out.  

A good solution tolerates human frailty; it’s based on the recognition that we’re not robots and that, inevitably, we’ll do something stupid, or careless, or just plain dumb, and probably more than once.  If we’re operating with a good solution, though, we’ll be able to somehow muddle through in the end.

The bicycle itself is a prime example of a good solution.  Your bike doesn’t have to run perfectly to get you from one place to another; it can be somewhat out of tune and still work fine.  

It also suffers fools gladly.  

Unlike a car, for instance, which requires vigilance and sobriety to operate safely, the bicycle tolerates a certain amount of blithe intoxication, and, in fact, even celebrates it.

So, you can accidentally wind up in a dead end or descend the wrong alley for no reason other than to climb out of it again and all remains good.  You’ll still eventually find the view you didn’t know you were looking for and get to make even more mistakes all night long.