Today is May 2 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often are you on the verge of making a usual mistake?”
Poet Walt Whitman published his poem Song of Myself as the first of twelve untitled poems in the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. The first edition was published by Whitman at his own expense.
In one section he found himself “on the verge of a usual mistake,” the error of mistaking the mockery and insults and tears and blows as the essential meaning of life. “I resume the overstaid fraction,” the poet says, indicating that when we encounter the most painful parts of experience, they can come to seem all-consuming, as we forget the generative and loving and developing aspects of life.
Those sunnier aspects form the majority of life’s moments, even if, during bleak times, that larger fraction can be eclipsed and lost for a while.
The poet now reclaims this fraction that has stayed away too long. And, as he does so, he evokes the story of Christ’s resurrection but does so in a remarkably secular way: we all experience a “crucifixion and bloody crowning.” We all bear a cross, wear a crown of thorns, and we must all learn—as Whitman has been instructing us in this poem—to take on the suffering and pain of others.
And then we must all resurrect ourselves, heal our gashes, rise again to do the work of building a wide-ranging democracy.
Life is filled with all-consuming events that can blind us from the loving aspects of life if we allow them to.
Whitman labeled this his ‘usual mistake.’
How often are you on the verge of making a usual mistake?