The biggest mistake we can make in our lives is not making enough mistakes.

A good teacher (besides Life itself) explained to me this month that we are all politicians.

When I was a teenager, my step father was a Member of the Legislative Assembly, of New Brunswick. I have always been proud of his accomplishment in becoming MLA. I've always respected the fact that he pursued what he felt was important but I didn't and don't necessarily agree with his particular politics.

That said, I don't think of him as the P-word [pssst you know: politician]. To my mind the word politician denotes a liar, someone out for themselves, riding on the shoulders of the people. In that vein of thought I never conceived of myself as having potential to be or of being a politician either.

Now assuming this bit about how we are all politicians, is true, if every interaction we have with another human being is indeed a political act, well sir, I have been a terrible politician indeed.

After all, if my teacher is to be believed, a politician's role is to lead in an attempt to control and resolve conflict. They have to be able to push an agenda. Except for my dad and a few rare others, I always thought of politicians as hypocrits. How can a person believe and say one thing and do another? Well now!

So worried have I always been about how everyone might feel about things and so difficult it's always been for me to see any one choice in things above another, that I've always had a difficult time stating my own case. Often I have a hard time even figuring out what my case is.

The greatest revelation in all of this to me is that my not being willing or often not capable of picking a side, has been my greatest downfall and has been perceived as a lack ambition and lack of character. This came as somewhat of a shock to me. I had always seen my ability to empathise as a strength. Indeed an empathetic parent is a good thing but an agent in the universe, in need of leaving a positive mark on the world, must pick a side therefore choices are necessary. By not making a choice I have often made the worst choice of all.

In the last few weeks I've had the opportunity to do something that I've never really felt at Liberty to do. I've had the chance to drive around and take wrong turns in a new town, in this case two towns that I have visited but really don't know them very well, Woodstock and Oromocto. Sometimes I took the same wrong turn (haha several times) over but eventually I learned which turn was the right one.

Here's the point: Unless her choices run parallel, a woman has to be impossibly flexible to walk down more than one path at a time. In life we have to pick a path, pursue it with all we've got, and do our best to learn from getting lost.