What If It Wasn't a Mistake?

I was listening to Jon Batiste talk about music.

At one point he said something along the lines of:

"There are no mistakes. There is only discovery."

I immediately thought of singing.

There have been so many moments over the last year where I thought something was wrong.

I couldn't find a note.

I sang flat.

I lost the rhythm.

A vowel sounded strange.

An exercise felt impossible.

At the time, each one felt like evidence that I wasn't where I wanted to be.

But looking back, most of those moments turned out to be discoveries.

The note I couldn't find showed me a gap in my hearing.

The rhythm I kept missing revealed a pattern I wasn't noticing yet.

The difficult vowel showed me something my tongue was doing automatically.

The exercise that seemed impossible became a map of where learning wanted to happen next.

I still make mistakes...I mean discoveries.

Lots of them.

But more and more, I find myself wondering:

What discovery am I going to make today?

What don't I understand yet that I think I do?

What if discovery has been arriving wearing the costume of being wrong?