Life's Like That

Learn From Your Mistakes

by Jerry Bullock

Waddie Mitchell, the cowboy poet, has a great story-telling poem, "Goat On A Rope." The story goes something like this. Two cowboys were riding fence on the 2barB during the drought days in West Texas. They suddenly came upon a well. This would be a great find if they could bring in some water on this dry range. They decided their first task was to determine the depth of the well to see how much rope they would need for a well rope. They dropped a rock into the well and waited for the return sound as it hit the bottom. None came. So they got a bigger rock and dropped it in. Again there was no sound of the rock striking the bottom. Not to be deterred they looked around for something bigger to drop. They found just the thing, an old railroad tie. As they leaned over to hear the sound as it hits the bottom, much to their surprise a goat came running out of the woods behind them and dove into the well.

Just a few minutes later an old fellow came along and asked them if they had seen his goat.

"Well," said the peeler, "I hate to tell you but your goat just jumped down that there well."

"No," said the old man. "My goat is smarter than that, I don't believe he would jump in the well."

"Maybe not," said the rider. "Somebody's goat dived straight into the well."

"Well," said the herder, "I'm sure it wasn't mine. I left mine tied to a railroad tie."

This story happened several years since when we drove the grandkids through the Natural Bridge Cavern Wildlife Park. The first critters we encountered were the giant ostriches. Now the rules are clear: stay inside the car and drop the feed on the ground. Only the ostriches hadn't read the rules. They came right on into the car after the little sacks of feed.

You haven't lived until you have faced a full-grown ostrich eye-ball to eye-ball. They have a way of intruding into your space, if not your face. In the midst of this, Christian, the three-year old, in stark terror is screaming, "Get the sausage out of here, get the sausage out."

So whether it is a goat tied to a railroad tie or an ostrich you think is a sausage we all make mistakes sometimes. The important thing is to learn from our mistakes. There is a saying, "Experience is what you get when your idea don't work." The problem is if you don't learn from your mistakes you don't even get the experience.

Too many of us go through life making one mistake after another. We never learn what caused them. Then we tend to start blaming others. We say we are what we are because of what our mother or father or somebody else did to us. If it is not our fault, we can't help it and just have to live with it. We fail to learn the lessons of life. It is only when we begin to take responsibility for our actions and make ourselves accountable that we can apply the lesson and make the correction in the course.

I hope you are not tied to a railroad tie ... but if you are, hang on.