This month I made an error.  An oops, a lapse, a mistake, an accident.  I missed the renewal date on my Japanese driver’s license.  There’s a long story with lots of extenuating circumstances and bad information and whining but it doesn’t really matter.  It was my responsibility, and I screwed it up.  I felt like a total loser about this.  I don’t like making mistakes.

So I went out to the far, far suburbs, where the driving gods and demigods live and roar and gnash their teeth, to see what they would say.  I was prepared to have to take the (impossible) paper test and go through the (ridiculous) driving test all over again.  But I was hoping that maybe that wouldn’t be necessary.  You never know.  
   
Dealing with government offices and paperwork can send me right off the deep end, so I decided to use this trip as an experiment.  I already knew that I might not get my license renewed that day; my whole goal was to let go of the outcome and try to stay in my core of peace no matter what happened.
   
I lasted about ten minutes.  On the train there, I found myself spiraling into dark, gloomy, imaginary scenarios.  For instance: I might go, spend hours explaining what happened, pay my $60, and then somehow still not get my license.  Or maybe I wouldn’t get my license at all, ever, and then one day I would be called upon to drive an injured child!  who is bleeding!  to an emergency room!  And then in spite of my heroics I would get pulled over for the first time in my life and I would get arrested!  And they would take away my visa!  And throw me in chains!  And I would never see my daughter again!  
   
Oh, my mind.  My mind, it is so sick.  
   
So I stepped out of my mind and into the core of peace, that place in me that is just fine with or without license.  It is the part of me that cannot be corrupted or destroyed or devastated.  Call it the soul, call it wordlessness, call it whatever you want.  I happen to like Martha Beck’s phrase ‘the core of peace.’  
   
Anyway, so I patted the mind monkeys on the head, reminded myself that I already knew I probably wouldn’t get a license that day, and focused on staying peaceful.  
   
But before I knew it I was having imaginary conversations with people in my head.  My father, for instance.  He likes me very much, and so he might be upset that I had let my license expire after going to so much trouble to get it in the first place.  Or a friend might say something clever and disparaging about me being an adult and not even being able to drive.  Then I moaned in quiet mortification, seeing the irony of a life coach (who gives courses on getting organized!) missing her own license renewal.  I concluded that I was a total fraud.  Then I brooded for a while on an email from a friend who had asked rather primly how I could be upset when it was my own fault.  In short, I was back in my mind—what Anne Lamott calls that bad neighborhood where she tries not to go to alone, that sketchy, scary stretch of graffiti and gunshots and broken pavement.
   
I brought myself back.  It had only been ten minutes, and I had already exhausted myself.  I tried to think about how I might treat myself if I were my own client, or even my own daughter.  I invite you to try this on yourself some time when you are feeling extra loathsome, plus despicable with a side of pathetic.  Probably you’ll feel a rush of affection and laughter for this person, this person who tries so hard and yet makes so many mistakes; who feels so such drunken self-loathing and blazing self-righteousness at the same time; this person who, in spite of the setbacks and mortifications and her terrible flaws, keeps on chugging along trying to get it right.  Honestly, how can you feel anything but total love for this person?  Don’t you want to kiss her on the mouth?  
   
So I sat there on the train alternating between Thich Nhat Hanh and Lindsay Lohan on a bad day.  Every time I remembered to come back to peace, I found that below the peace there was this low, liquid, contagious giggle.  The peace seemed to find the whole thing just hilarious.
   
At the licensing office, I found myself in a special waiting area.  I was sitting with the physical manifestations of all my worst fears and failings: we of the broken teeth and bleary, confused eyes; we the foreign, different, other; we in too much makeup and wobbly high heels; we with our ludicrous tall tales of woe and tragedy; we who carried our official papers in a plastic grocery bag.  This motley crew was so beautiful to me.  I was even beautiful to myself.  We were a perfect picture of human frailty.  There we were: the misfits, the sad and lost, the frazzled, the desperate liars—all of us there to make it right if we could.  I wanted to hold their hands and sing Kumbaya.  
   
I restrained myself.  
   
And I heard another narrative start up in my mind.  This one had Aretha Franklin singing RESPECT playing as its soundtrack, and it went something like this: You know, I work so darn hard.  I did 17,492 things this year, and I got most of them right.  And this one, number 17,493, well—I royally fucked it up.  And what is so WRONG with that?  Can’t I mess up occasionally?  Who am I to think that I’m not allowed to do that?  Welcome to the human race, baby.  Leave your self-loathing and flagellation and groveling apologies behind.  You can be you and make mistakes.  
   
And then I remembered!  OH YEAH.  In my tribe, we make mistakes.  We make LOTS of mistakes because we do brave, difficult, renegade things.  We shoot high and so we fall on our asses sometimes.  If you’d like to join, your initiation will be relatively painless.  One simple round of kumbaya, and you’re in.  
   
Oh, and not that it’s the point, but they eventually?  They gave me my license.  But that’s another story.