I would like to take a moment to address every typo in The Chronicle that I didn’t catch in the proofing pages this year: Ahem. I’m grateful for every last one of them.
Every typo is embarrassing. And cringe-worthy. But all the typos taught me something this year – the same something, over and over again. Often in this life, you can’t see something, even if it’s right in front of your nose.
In The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupéry said that you can only see rightly with your heart, because “the essential is invisible to the eye.”
Like anyone ever caught typos with their heart. But aside from that, I think we might be muddying up the power our hearts once had.
Our hearts, bless them, have been brainwashed into thinking that they are solely responsible for getting our lives together.
We’ve been groomed to stress our hearts out, until the poor things can’t work at all. Even Grandmother Willow was in on the conspiracy. “Listen to your heart, you will understand.”
But what if my heart is telling me to run away to Oxford Law? Or study art history? And simultaneously open a bakery in Salt Lake? (Uh, where did that come from?) And never study anything again ever because I’m finally graduating? And screaming, please — for the love of all that is holy — don’t make me feel anymore. I am done being your personal compass. Can you just stop bugging me about figuring out your life for you so I can breathe and maybe actually work? Please, thank you, that’s all.
A while ago, I read an article that said that the biggest mistakes you can make in your 20s are thinking that you have to A) figure things out and B) have everything together.
I herewith bequeath upon the world the two things I’ve learned from three years of typos and mistakes, both journalistic and not, while I’ve worked at The Chronicle.
1. You won’t be able to see or understand everything at any given moment.
2. It’s like that for a reason.
The reason is probably that you’re human. Healthy, happy humans just can’t catch every typo and have everything planned out at the drop of a hat. They just can’t, and thinking you have to is paralyzing.
On top of that, having your life 100 percent together is dangerous. It makes you sell yourself short and robs you of the most valuable treasure we have as a rising generation: The power to dream.
Because if we have our whole lives together right now, who knows what things we’ll miss out on, simply because we haven’t thought of them yet? If all we’ve got is what we are and what we’re capable of now, we’ll cheat the world, and ourselves, of our sheer awesomeness. If you leave the kids on the block and take your ball home, you’ll miss the whole game.
If everyone had their life planned out at 20, Harper Lee never would have written To Kill A Mockingbird. Most presidents would never have run for president. We would not even have chocolate chip cookies. (Look it up. Ruth Wakefield was in her 30s when she figured those out). Over-planning, and over-defending, and over-perfectionalizing might just be the things holding us back from becoming the versions of ourselves that could change our corner of the world and live happier lives than we can imagine.
So get over yourself, and let your heart do its real job — dream and live.
To my fabulous team at The Chronicle, and my dear family and friends: Thank you for putting up with my typos, big and small. We’ll get there. The sky’s the limit.