There are no mistakes in life…

“There no mistakes in life”. I used to struggle with this phrase, back in the days when I understood less about the perfection of G-d’s plans.

And in the past few weeks, I seem to have more and more angels reinforcing what I’ve learned about life’s perfection.
You see, I used to argue with reality and always lose the argument. If I did something that didn’t satisfy me (or vice versa someone else did same), I used to argue with it to death.

Here are a few examples of how mistakes are all in the eye of the beholder:
1. Divorce
Someone asked me if it was a mistake to marry the woman I did, who in 2007 first asked me for a divorce, which we concluded in 2010. My answer is this simple: Look into the eyes of my four wonderful kids, look at the pictures of the wonderful moments my wife and I spent together, and then you will have just witnessed my answer to you. Others may not agree…that’s their issue, not mine. There are no mistakes.

2. Work
In 1988, I founded ICP Solar (that wasn’t the name then but that’s not important). In 2010, I left its doors for the last time. We sold enough solar panels into the market to be the equivalent of planting over a million trees in terms of how much carbon was avoided by the power they would create. Today many of those panels still create power. It put four kids through private schooling, gave us holidays as we wished them to be, parties that people spoke of for years afterwards and a house we made a home, and I even got to drive a Porsche 911 for almost eight years.

In 2002, a foreman I had made an error of judgment and shipped goods to the wrong place. Someone told me I should fire him to which I responded….”and hire someone who does the same thing again? This guy just learned from that experience, I paid for it, and you want me to get rid of him?”

Earlier this year I had lunch with my father. I asked him the same kind of question..”what mistakes have you ever made?”. He struggled with the question at first and then put up that at some point someone had offered to buy his company for a lot of money. And then he thought about it and said “but then if I had done that, I wouldn’t have had all those great years with this major client (name protected) for all that time”.

3. Death
Today I was at a funeral for a woman I never knew. My partner Laura and myself went to support a family which has been welcoming and kind to my son Justin and whose member Sarah is like a big sister to my daughter Emma. That woman’s story was so inspiring and the rabbi presiding over the ceremony said “she understood how perfect G-d’s plan really is, something which many of us don’t learn to accept while here on earth”.

These examples have helped me to concretize the belief that everything happens for a reason. And if we don’t learn the lesson the first time around, life will throw us a second time to learn it, unless learning it is not part of the plan. To argue with that is to create my own suffering. And suffering is something that I really don’t feel the need to do anymore. Pain may be necessary, but there’s only one person on earth that has the power to create my own misery…me.