I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. The good thing is that you can learn from your mistakes. So I thought I might get a little vulnerable this week and share one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made so you can avoid the same dumb decision.
I was 10 years old and playing basketball in the backyard with my brothers. I am the middle child of three boys (Yup, all boys and no sisters. My poor mom). All of us loved sports and would have epic showdowns of backyard basketball, where we thought that touching the net was the same as dunking.
After a couple of intense games of knockout and “horse” (my older brother would always try to convince me that horse was spelled without an “e” when he was winning), we decided to take a bathroom break. Now for 3 brothers growing up in Lancaster, PA, any bush or tree makes a good toilet. So with that being said, we all picked the nearest bush…
The only problem with this particular bush is that it contained a very large beehive! I didn’t realize our mistake until my older brother started jumping and yelling like a cat being dipped into water. Then my younger brother stared the same routine. Not wanting to be outdone by my screaming brothers, I started jumping and yelling too, although I had no idea why! And then I saw them, dozens of bees, upset that their home had been so rudely defiled by me and my brothers.
My older brother and I bee-lined it (haha) straight into our house, locked the door, and stripped off our clothes as bees flew out of them. That’s when we realized that my younger brother — who was 7 at the time — was still outside, trying to fend off the bees himself. My older brother and I couldn’t help but laugh watching him run around our front yard, attempting to outrun a swarming mass of bees. I remember my older brother saying “What an idiot, why didn’t he just run inside?” It was then that we remembered that, in our own panic, we had locked the door behind us (I’m not quite sure why we locked the door. Like bees really could get through an unlocked door?)! We then started laughing even harder (sweet brotherly love), and opened the door for him.
Despite about a dozen or so stings, there was no real damage done. My brothers escaped with swollen faces and hands, — and I just escaped with a good story, because unlike my unfortunate brothers, I somehow managed to escape without a single bee sting!
So now is the time where I tell you all about the value of choosing to learn from your mistake and how I have grown from my experience. Well, I’m not really sure what to tell you. I could try to come up with a moral and say that I learned not to follow the crowd or never leave a brother behind, but that would be too big of a stretch. So I guess the only profound moral of the story is this: the next time you are in a dire situation out in the woods, don’t pee where you can’t see.
