Mistakes like Sparks

I have this theory (I should pretty much start all my blog posts with these words!) that all of our mistakes are like sparks we constantly let off into the ether. We send an email to the wrong person, forget to call our mother on her birthday, arrive late to lunch with a friend, etc. After a moment of embarrassment on our part each of these "sparks" fades out and we think little of it again. That is unless a spark comes into contact with someone carrying around toxic waste, then, BAM! The person we sent the wrong email to is mad about the content, our mother feels neglected and lashes out, etc These explosions (small or large as they may be) make us feel horrible, like we have done something really wrong. The problem with this is that we have not been taught to judge our mistake by the character of the mistake but by the reaction it engenders. If we are late for lunch and the person says, "No worries! I got to catch up on my texts" we feel fine, like maybe we haven't done anything wrong after all. But if the friend launches into a lecture about how her time and maybe the whole friendship isn't really valuable after all, then we feel that we have really made a big mistake. The action, or mistake, is the same; it is only the reaction that is different. But we judge the size of the mistake on how it has made someone feel. In some ways that seems logical, right? We don't want to go around hurting or upsetting others so we judge the size of our mistakes on its effect on others. But there are several big problems with this thinking. First, it is hard, if not impossible, to judge what action will create a reaction in someone else. I once spent a day cleaning the house before my sister-in-law arrived, only to have her say, "It looks like no one lives here!" I truly think she was disappointed not to see the evidence of our daily lives since she rarely got to be around us. The same is true of mistakes. I can forget to text someone and he is fine with it, but someone else finds it very insulting. . This does not allow for us to control our own moral code, which is possibly quite different from others. Secondly, and perhaps even more significantly, if we don't learn to judge our mistakes by what we personally feel about them then we cannot make up for the big mistakes that may engender little or no reaction. Like I said, most mistakes are sparks, but some are blow torches that we carelessly scorch others with but never know it. Maybe it is a flippant comment or a missed meeting that if we really stopped to think about we would work hard to make up for, but since there was little to no reaction on the part of the recipient, we let it go. Sometimes there is no reaction because the person is afraid of confrontation and sometimes it's because that person does not know how to stick up for him or herself. Somewhere deep inside we know that we need to make amends but we do not, because we have learned to react to our mistakes only if there is a reaction from someone else. This may be why gossip is so insidious: we don't feel that it is wrong because we almost never see any reaction by someone else. So our sense of morality, whether our actions are right or wrong, walks around outside of us and depends on the whims (and baggage) of others. And therefore, our own individual morality, what we value and what we do not, does not evolve. I find that nowadays I take this viewpoint to an extreme but I feel much truer to myself. The other day I found myself mentally berating my husband for forgetting to mail a package to our daughter, only to find out he had tried and the post office was closed. There was no reaction on his part because he was not aware of what I had been thinking, but it felt wrong to me. How often did I need to learn that I rarely had all the facts to be so critical? So to atone for my mistake I gave him an impromptu foot rub. Somehow this atonement made me feel that I was moving forward in my thinking and at the very least gave a little affection to someone to whom I had been unfair (even if just in my mind). But I want to hear from you! What do you think about this theory? And feel free to disagree!