One Time, One Meeting

If you have lived in a northern climate for any length of time, the chances are good that you have slipped and fallen on an icy sidewalk. Or that you will, no matter how careful you are.

Such was the case a few weeks back, as I was walking down the sidewalk in Alfred, New York, wearing shoes more suitable to spring than winter. Coming upon a puddle in the middle of the sidewalk, I stepped onto a mound of ice to avoid the water. Down I went, face forward, landing on my knee.

Thanks, I suspect, to my daily practice of T’ai Chi, I was back on my feet a moment later, suffering no worse injury than a scraped knee. But as the day wore on, and as I felt the lasting effects of my fall, I considered what to call it. Was it a mishap—something, as they used to say in Ireland, that could happen to a bishop? Or was it an avoidable mistake? Although those two small words share a common prefix, their meanings differ widely, as do their implications.

The word mishap derives from the root hap, which means “chance” or “luck.” From the same root come happiness, perhaps, and happenstance. Hap was once an English word, as can be seen in Thomas Hardy’s sonnet by that name, in which the poet ponders the causes of his misery. After entertaining the possibility that he is being punished by a vengeful deity, he concludes that the operative force is “Crass Casualty,” Hardy’s synonym for chance, or “hap,” or the luck of the draw. Nowadays, hap is archaic, but its meaning survives in the word mishap, which the O.E.D. defines as “an unlucky accident.” As late as the nineteenth century, mishap was also a polite term for a “fall from chastity,” as in “In her youth, Lady Betty made a mishap.”

Mistake is of another order entirely, mainly because it involves human volition. Derived from a root meaning “to grasp” or “to understand,” the word mistake may refer to a conceptual error. At any time, any one of us may be mistaken. We may fail to “take” another person’s meaning. More often, however, the word mistake refers to an action, such as swerving out of one’s lane while driving, a move that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has identified as the leading cause of lethal crashes. Cars do not drive themselves, at least not yet. When a traffic accident occurs, almost always someone has made a mistake.

Eihei Dogen Zenji (1200-1253), founder of the Soto school of Zen, famously described a Zen master’s life as “one continuous mistake.” Shoshaku jushaku, the phrase he used, means “to succeed wrong with wrong.” Hearing that phrase, I’m reminded of Bob, a friend from my high-school days, who tried three times before passing his driving test. Not long afterward, Bob was ticketed for speeding on a road at the edge of town. And not long after that, he was ticketed again by the same cop on the same road and lost his hard-earned driver’s license. Up to that point at least, Bob’s life was indeed one continuous mistake.

And yet in fairness to Dogen Zenji as well as to Bob, we may recall that most mistakes have many mothers and fathers. One of the cardinal tenets of Zen teachings, a principle known as “dependent co-origination,” states that in ultimate reality, everything depends upon everything else. Things that we conventionally regard as solid and separate are, in reality, constantly changing, and they have no inherent existence. Nor do they arise, ex nihilo, from nowhere. Rather, they arise from concrete causes and conditions, as do we ourselves. We too are constantly being created and re-created by causes and conditions, and like our so-called successes and failures, our mistakes are not simply the results of our personal volitions. They are also expressions of our conditioning, cultural and personal, and their roots may lie as much in our ancestry as in our conscious choices. Like the farmer in Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” who quotes the adage “good fences make good neighbors” and “won’t go beyond his father’s saying,” we too can become prisoners of our cultural and familial conditioning.