A-Playful-Path_DeKoven-web

On being wrong
Having done something stupid and embarrassing again – and I’ll tell you it was so stupid
and so embarrassing that I really don’t want to talk about it, at all, ever – I found my self
really punishing my self for having done what I did. And after about half hour of surprisingly
brutal internal rhetoric, it became obvious to me that what I needed more than anything else
was some kind of recess. I just had to take my self away from all this. It was something we all
needed.
From having hung around the internal playground for so many years, I suspected that there I
wasn’t the only one who needed to go out for recess. That’s the way it seems to work. Usually,
wherever I find my self, there’s at least two of me there. And the fact of the matter was, it
wasn’t just me that I was so embarrassed about that needed to get away, it was also me that
was trying make the other me that I was so embarrassed about feel more embarrassed, or
stupid, or guilty or just basically and completely wrong.
So I decided to send them out together.
For the sake of recall, I called one “Wrong” and the other “Right”.
Before I go any further, I want to make sure that you know that I knew it was only me all
along, and that each of those “me”s was really only me, playing. Me playing Mr. Wrong, just
as surely as it was me playing Mr. Right. That’s what makes it fun, don’t you see, that, from
the very beginning, it’s me, playing.
By the time we got to the playground, Mr. Right agreed that he would always be Right,
regardless.
And Mr. Wrong, with odd intimations of glee, agreed to always be wrong, also regardless. So
the only thing Mr. Wrong never felt wrong about was how completely Wrong he was being.
So there we were, Mr. Right and Mr. Wrong. And we were still feeling kind of rotten about
each other. Mr. Right telling Mr. Wrong that he could do nothing right. And Mr. Wrong
agreeing, abysmally, gleefully.
There was still so much tension between them that it really seemed to them, given they were
on the inner playground now, that they were playing something very much like a game of
Tug of War.
Now Mr. Right, who, as we know, is, by necessity of convention always Right, instinctively
knew that if he tried to play a game of Tug of War with Mr. Wrong the game would just nev-
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