Yesterday, Pace and I listened to a recording through Entrepreneurs Unplugged by Marie Forleo (warning: annoying website), and she was talking about how you cannot make a mistake at all, ever.

At first, I didn’t understand. I make mistakes all the time! What are you talking about?! I’m not perfect; I can and do make mistakes. I feel like a huge part of my past was based on mistakes, things I could have done differently. Had I only thought harder, had I only known more, had I only listened to my intuition, had I only…

But once it was said, my life was changed.

I could feel it percolating. I could feel it sitting in me, being true, waiting patiently for me to get everything lined up just right so I could get it. And then lightening struck. And then I did get it, all of a sudden. And I gasped and covered my face, I cried and I laughed and I stared off into space, amazed.

There are no mistakes – we are utterly perfect as we are right now, and we are the only way we could have possibly turned out.

Imagine your past as a cord.

It’s beautifully weaved together from all the threads you’ve ever added, stretching back to your beginnings. Each thread is a moment in your life. Each thread is a decision.

At any given moment, you could not have chosen any thread to add other than the thread you chose. If you were holding two threads, let’s say a red one and an orange one, and you threw the orange one out and added the red one – then the red one is the only thread you ever would have added to the cord, period. But you had the orange one in your hand! You could’ve chosen it instead of the red one, right?! I certainly wish I had – my cord would be so much better.

Yes, that certainly feels true. It felt true to me, too. But, get this – you chose the thread that you chose, and that’s the only thread you would have ever chosen.

Given what you knew in that moment (not what you know now, but what you knew then), given your past, given the cord of your life, you chose the red thread. You would never have chosen the orange one, even if you went back and did that moment over a million times – because your past led you to choose the red one. The threads, the choices, you made up to that moment are why you chose what you did, and you can’t change the past, so you couldn’t have done anything differently.

We are perfect, just as we are right now.

This is monumental. This means that each and every one of us are exactly how we are supposed to be exactly right now. This means that there are no mistakes, because we all do what we do based on what our cords are in every given moment, so we could not have done it differently, so we can’t make mistakes.

We can choose poorly, sure. We can regret our choices. But we can’t change them and we can’t go back. Hindsight is 20/20, as they say, but current sight is all we’ve got. Agonizing over past choices is only harmful. Learning from past choices is awesome and fruitful, but agonizing over them is so much easier! I’m rabidly guilty of that.

But now, I get it. I understand. Given who I was, I did what I chose to do, and I usually did my best. I certainly acted in accordance with myself and my nature and my history, which is all any of us do.

And there’s no point in beating myself up over that. I was who I was, I am who I am, I will be who I will be. I love myself, I respect myself, and now I understand myself a huge lot better.

This is a tough concept. Tough to write about and tough to understand. I’m only beginning to understand what this means and all its implications. I’m sure I’ll get it and then forget it and have to get it all over again, over and over – that’s a big pattern for me in learning big huge life-changing things.

Do you get it? Do you understand? Can you think of other metaphors, other ways to explain, other ways this could change your life?