THE THREAD | Raise your hand if you make mistakes

When I was in college I sang in the choir. Our choir director, Dr. Epley, insisted on several habits during our rehearsals to make sure that each of us learned our part.

One of the habits was this: If you make a mistake, raise your hand. No, really, just stick your hand up in the air like a fish popping its head out of the water and then back down.

When rehearsing a song with forty people, everyone is going to make a mistake at some point – coming in too soon, or hitting the wrong note, or a voice cracking like a 12-year-old boy, or singing Careery-yay Lazen when it is supposed to be Kyrie Eleison, or singing the wrong part entirely because sometimes altos actually forget altogether that they’re supposed to be doing something. (Sorry, altos, sorry sorry.)

So instead of trying to make our mistakes disappear into the crowd, moving on, and hoping that no one notices, Dr. Epley taught us the importance and simplicity of owning and acknowledging our mistakes in the moment. So while practicing a song, you could look around the room and occasionally see a hand just raise up into the air for a couple of seconds, then lower. Fish up, fish down.

That’s all it was. It was not meant to be embarrassing or distracting. Rather, it normalized simple mistakes and internalized an odd sort of humility. And it meant that Dr. Epley didn’t need to stop the song every single time to figure out what had gone wrong, or whether we knew how to pronounce basic Latin words, or whether the altos were dingbats, the whole bunch of them. (Sorry sorry.)

Performing in a choir is a collective effort that entirely depends on the full participation and concentration of each individual. When everyone else in the room shares the same simple way of owning their mistakes, it takes away any stigma from basic human error and allows us instead to just focus on learning the music and improving each of our own participation in creating the song together.

And doesn’t that actually just sound wonderful? And doesn’t it just seem to be relevant to so many other aspects of life? And doesn’t it mean we can find ways to accept each others mistakes as incredibly human, even the altos? I’ve found that to be the case, at least. When I make a mistake and I am tempted to bury it, or to move on quickly, or to pretend it wasn’t even me, or worst of all, to find a way to blame someone else for my error, often I will try to remember those rehearsals. I try to remember how simple it can be to raise my hand and fully own my own voice.

Fish up, fish down.

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What I’m currently reading: Donald Barthalme’s Forty Stories, Tom Bissell’s Magic Hours.

What I’m listening to: Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3.