The importance of dumb mistakes in college
I’m in college, and have made my fair of mistakes that I think are “dumb” in the eyes of my peers, family, friends, society, etc, but not many that I think are “dumb” in my eyes. The most prominent mistake that I can think of? I’m spending a fourth year at a community college rather than having transferred to a university after my second or third year. I graduated high school in June 2014. I should have graduated college in May&#x2F;June 2018. But now I will most likely be graduating May&#x2F;June 2020 (heck, maybe a few semesters later).<p>My life as of now has not turned out the way I had planned it. I have yet to have an internship under my belt. I have no connections. If you will, I’m a twenty-two-year-old modern day George Costanza prior to him getting that job with the New York Yankees - when he’s living with his parents and has no job. Yet I think I’ll be just okay.<p>But above all, I would like to advise other people, not only colleges students but to those who think they have made “dumb” decisions: Please do not worry. Modern mass culture, or as the film maker Tarkovsky writes, the civilization of prosthetics, cripples people&#x27;s souls and makes people&#x27;s mistakes&#x2F;problems bigger than they actually are. Though I recall a year ago, struggling alone and having no hope. What guided me towards today? Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Here are a few quotes from the book:<p>&quot;Everything seems to me to have its just emphasis; and after all I do only want to advise you to keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.&quot;<p>&quot;Consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every such argumentation, discussion or introduction; if you are wrong after all, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights. Leave your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling to come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one&#x27;s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist&#x27;s life: in understanding as in creating.&quot;<p>&quot;If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance. You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.&quot;<p>&quot;Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.&quot;<p>&quot;We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.&quot;<p>&quot;And if there is one thing more that I must say to you, it is this: Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find these words.&quot;<p>&quot;There is perhaps no use my going into your particular points now; for what I could say about your tendency to doubt or about your inability to bring outer and inner life into unison, or about all the other things that worry you —: it is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.&quot;